Complete Original Artwork For “I, Rocket,” An Adaptation Of A Ray Bradbury Short Story By Al Feldstein

I read that a few years ago and it was WILD. I only remember picking it up because it was mentioned in an episode of Criminal Minds and it sounded crazy haha

It really is! I find a lot of Ray Bradbury stories completely out there, ESPECIALLY considering how old they are!

And obligatory favourite quotes, and they are all related to death, because of course, Ray 💀💀💀

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

Oh, death in space was most humorous.

And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

— Ray Bradbury, “Zen in the Art of Writing”

15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935

“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”

- Ray Bradbury

“It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead...”

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

October Country

...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noon go quickly, ducks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

Ray Bradbury

"To think that thought could live that long! A million years, perhaps, all these thoughts of death and disorder and conquest, lingering in the innocent but poisonous air of the planet, waiting for a real man to give them a channel through which they might issue again in all their senseless virulence."

Asleep in Armageddon, Ray Bradbury

from The October Game by Ray Bradbury

“I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”

— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

-- Ray Bradbury

(Cluj, Romania)

October Country by Ray Bradbury Cover by Joe Mugnaini