Comic book of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Over at Total Dick-Head, David Gill has word on the forthcoming comic book adaptation of Philip K. Dick's iconic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Of course, this is the 1968 book that the film Blade Runner was based on. The first issue will have four cover versions with art by Denis Calero, Bill Sienkiewicz and Scott Keating, and Moritat. Warren Ellis is writing the first issue's back-matter, and that concerns Gill. Not me though, I'm a huge fan of Ellis's fiction and comix, and look forward to see what he comes up with in this context. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Become a Comic Book Series"
UPDATE: BOOM Studios' Chip Mosher says the 24 issue series is not an adaptation of the novel but the "full text, fully illustrated." More here!
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I wonder to what extent they will do an original adaptation, and to what extent they will just rehash the aesthetics of Blade Runner. If the cover is any indication, I'm not particularly optimistic. What about plot and tone? Will they adhere more to the wry, sardonic, quasi-religious tone of Dick, or the pessimistic, sardonic, atheistic tone of Blade Runner?
Spellcheck please: Dearm=Dream
Will this version actually answer the damn question or will it just settle whether or not they dream about unicorns?
@#1: Good questions. But Blade Runner was more than aesthetics, IMHO. Curious about the 'quasi-religious vs. atheistic' tone you mention. Must now finally read story ASAP.
Also, four different cover versions for the first issue? Whoah. Looking forward to the series.
I've read the 1982 Blade Runner comic book. (And I have all three covers of that one, you can read it online at http://www.brmovie.com/Comic/index.htm) It wasn't bad, but I hope this one isn't a rehash. I like the film, and I wouldn't mind if some of the images and visual styles of the film made it into the comic, but the book had an entirely different aesthetic.
That looks awesome.
@Manooshi.
I take it you've not read any PKD, then?
Well worth it, if you get the chance. A lot of his work is quasi-religious in the way that #1 mentions. Also, if you do enjoy any of it, it's well worth readng a biography of him. There was a fairly recent and excellent one by Emmanuel Carrere (the French loved Dick, apparently) it really helps give context to his fiction.
I've never bought comic books. How does one get all these? Do you have to show up at a comic store on the first of the month? Do I subscribe and they're mailed to me?
People going into this expecting something along the lines of Blade Runner -- or any modern "run and gun" sci fi story -- are in for a rude surprise. The people who've read the novel know what I'm talking about.
I think Mercer is going to freak people out.
I like Boom but doing the "full text" of the novel is troubling .. comics are a completely different medium. What works in PKD's novel isn't going to work in a monthly comic book. Generally speaking, he's not a guy who could be easily serialized, in any form.
@TGG161 - New comics hit the stands every Wednesday. Most comic book news sites will have the release schedule up at the beginning of the week. Check out CBR.cc or Newsarama. If they have this on the list, just show up at your local comic shop on Wednesday to buy it.
Whoa whoa whoa -- Rachel's played by Kusanagi?
The movie Blade Runner qualifies as a masterpiece, but it had almost nothing to do with the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In the novel, for example, the protagonist is an older mid-fifties guy who's married and doing a dreary workaday job he hates. No gorgeous nubile replicants, no charismatic Rutger Hauer, nothing like that in the novel at all. The most famous lines in the motion picture Blade Runner were improvised by Hauer: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Search Dick's novel for those words, but in vain. He wasn't that good a writer.
The truth remains that Philip K. Dick mostly churned out hack work. For his best work, check out his short stories, all turned out early at top speed. Some of them, like "Second Variety" and "The Father-Thing," have a Twilight-Zoney twist ending that provides a momentary thrill.
Dick's novels for the most part fall flat. His best are Ubik and The Man In the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip, all vastly superior to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but none remotely as impressive to the best science fiction novels.
Philip K. Dick became hugely famous because, by sheer luck, several of his short stories and novels got adapted into incredibly successful and famous films. Those appear to be flukes. Subsequent Dick adaptations have not captured the public imagination, and the more accurate the adaptation -- such as A Scanner Darkly -- the less the public liked them. In other words, the more accurately a filmmaker renders a Philip K. Dick novel or story onscreen, the more the public hates it. (We see the same phenomenon at work with Arthur C. Clarke. The film 2010, a much more accurate and Clarke-like adaptation of his work, proved vastly less popular with movie audiences that the distinctly un-Clarkelike collaboration with Stanely Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey.) This makes sense, since Dick is just not that good a writer. He keeps re-using the same cast of cardboard characters: the middle-aged schmuck working a 9-to-5 job he hates, the ditsy hippy girl who flits into his life, the clueless stoner buddy who distracts the protagonist, and so on. One aspect of his work that the films almost completely miss is Dick's black humour, on copious display in the novel A Scanner Darkly, which manages to come across as horrible and wildly funny at the same time.
Dick had serious problems with the narrative and plotting of his novels. He produced them at top speed under the influence of methamphetamine in a desperate bid to make enough money to stay alive. It shows in the writing. For example, A Scanner Darkly starts off with a scene introducing a minor character who appears briefly and then is never heard of again. This proves distracting and annoying, and it damages the narrative flow of the novel. Dick could have used the help of a good editor, but the reality remains that Dick wrote so much so fast in order to survive that no editor could have helped him because by the time one book was ready to whip into shape, Dick was already deep into writing another one. He got paid peanuts and lived in terrible poverty, and Dick just didn't have time to polish his work to the point where it stands up to repeated readings.
Other, much better science fiction writers deserve a lot more attention than Philip K. Dick. Names that come to mind include: Frederick Pohl, Poul Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. LeGuin, C. J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Edgar Pangborn, Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, Kate Wilhelm and Samuel R. Delaney all produced novels far better than the best of Philip K. Dick's output. Not one of these superb writers have had their major novels adapted to the screen except for Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. I don't need to tell anyone how badly the screenwriters badly hacked up that book. Bad decisions like setting the narrative in the present day instead of the future doomed that film from the git-go.
Frederick Pohl's Gateway, LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossed, Pangborn's Davy, Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and The Doorway Into Summer, Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17 and Nova, Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen and Zelazny's Lord of Light all deserve to be made into movies or TV miniseries far more than anything Philip K. Dick ever churned out. Not one of these classic science fiction novels has ever been adapted to the big or small screen. The attention paid to Philip K. Dick's work mystifies people who care about literary quality, and baffles serious fans of science fiction.
If you flip a coin a dozen times and do it again, and then keep doing it, eventually the laws of chance dictate that you will get a dozen heads in a row. It's a rare occurrence, but it happens. Philip K. Dick happened to hit the lottery after his death when several of his lesser works got made into immensely successful movies (by radically changing and throwing out most of the plot and characters and narrative in his original stories, incidentally).
That's all well and good for Philip K. Dick's heirs and it's always delightful to see any writer achieving success, for whatever reason. The fact remains that many vast better science fiction writers languish in obscurity for no good reason.
Great post, 11. I, for one, thought Demolished Man read almost like a screenplay already. It was very visually stimulating. Ditto for parts of Stars... Still, I shudder to think of how badly Hollywood would screw it up. Maybe the value of Dick's writing is its lack of form; easier to cut up and tear down, and less guilt involved.
Maybe it'd be interesting to have an art-house adaptation of Ubik which referred to the process of writer-decay and artificial cinematic renewal you're referring to.
cant agree about Philip K Dick - i loved his books when i first started reading sci-fi in the 70's and long before Blade Runner. He was up against writers such as Asimov, Farmer, Anderson, Blish, Clark etc who i also read and i found P K Dick's stuff to be better. Novels like Ubik
(brilliant), Flow my Tears, The three stigmata... and even lesser novels like the Zap Gun were fresh and original at a time when a lot of author were still churning out pulp rubbish and tlaking about aliens from planet zog.
How anyone can diss work of the quality of The Man in the High Castle (which, you will remember won the Hugo Award from his peers)is beyond me. Sounds like there is a bit of jealousy creeping in perhaps!!?.
I agree that some of his work may not have made the transition to screen well BUT i believe this is due to the quality of the film team. Ridley Scott is a visionary who took the book to new heights and perfectly complemented K Dick's motives- If Ridley gets hold of Ubik - watch out!!
Philip K. Dick's novels may not have the literary sparkle of the other novels posted earlier, but what he lacked in polish, he made up for in originality. His stories probe essential questions: what makes us human? What is reality and how trustworthy is it? Why do we behave as we do? Is there any point to us being here?
I think that there's more genius in asking interesting questions than in phrasing the answers correctly.
Philip K Dick makes a lot of SF 'experts' angry. Why do people lionize the writing of a drugged up hack who wrote four books a year? Because he wasn't motivated by status and the Canon. Philip K Dick was a true original. I loved his books when I first encountered them because he didn't think "Plot" was the most important thing. IDEA and CHARACTER was. His stories meandered in crazy directions, had lots of dead ends and loose ends, but that just made them more endearing to me. More like what happens in real life, with characters who live and breathe on his pages. I fell in love with so many of them.
Sure, he wrote crazy amounts and not all his books were as absolutely classic as ANDROIDS, UBIK, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, FLOW MY TEARS or A SCANNER DARKLY. But I'll take any one of his "churned out" titles against three from any of the "much better writers" listed by snobby #11 (and yes, I have read all of those listed).
How well his work fares in film is another story. Much as I adore and revere BLADE RUNNER it's surprisingly humorless compared to the source. But it's his humanity and grasp of what really matters in fiction that makes people keep wanting to recreate those ideas of his on the big screen. I doubt anyone could really do his ideas more justice than Linklater managed with his adaptation. I'll bet people will continue to try. And 'experts' like #11 will continue failing to get it.