Publishers Weekly is reporting that Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Hill and Wang imprint will republish Ray Bradbury‘s classic Fahrenheit 451 as a graphic novel, adapted by Tim Hamilton, in August. They’ve already pegged the book to Banned Books Week, which comes in September, and will be doing major promotion at the San Diego Comic Con.
FSG plans a combined 75,000-copy first printing in both hardcover and paperback. They’ve also sold first serial rights to Playboy magazine (where it will appear in the July/August issue). This, too, is a long-running connection: Playboy first serialized the original novel in 1954
Hill and Wang’s Publisher Thomas LeBien acquired the project. He also has plans for graphic novel adaptations of other Bradbury classics, including The Martian Chronicles collection (1950), and the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). PW quotes LeBien as saying he saw an opportunity to create a “nuanced” graphic adaptation that offered “the subtle notes and tones of Bradbury’s prose in images that would breathe the book’s adjectives and verbs—capture all the atmospherics of the book. Ray looked over it all and gave it his stamp of approval.”