To interpret Farenheit 451 as a story about the dangers of "trading down" from prose to other forms of media is to ignore the historical context in which it was written - just as tarring all graphic novels as "shallow" ignores the existence of great graphic novels and trashy prose fiction.

It is true, as Boxer points out, dumbed-down media was a recurring trope in the novel. But any dumbing down that's happening now is driven by market forces and a cultural habit of - to borrow from Neil Postman - amusing ourselves to death. In Farenheit 451 the emptiness of "legal" forms of storytelling is a symptom of censorship. The government in that world destroys books (and the people who own them) in order to destroy dissenting ideas.

Think about what America was like in the early 1950s, when this book was written. The people of this country - or at least the ones with the lion's share of political and economic power - espoused a rigid culture of conformity that often shut out diversity and dissidence. Books were banned because their content was considered "dangerous" in some way. I'd bet money that Bradbury used the theme of burning books because it hearkened back to a common practice of the (then) recently defeated Nazis. If we keep going down this road, he seemed to be saying, we'll end up just like them.

As to why Bradbury collaborated on a graphic novel form of his book - I can understand that. Perhaps he wanted to reach readers of comic books as well as readers of "serious" books, or more likely he was just intrigued by the idea of telling his story with different media just to see what would happen.

I would advise Ms. Boxer to consider that. Also to read, in exactly this order, Maus, Sandman, Watchmen and Transmetropolitan.