I opened my e-mail inbox this morning to find a press release from BOOM! Studios. BOOM! is a comic book company out on the west coast, an up-and-coming publisher that does a bit of horror comics (zombies and Cthulhu), licensed Pixar comics (The Incredibles, Cars, that sort of thing), licensed television comics (Farscape and Eureka), super-hero comics (Mark Waid’s Irredeemable), and a bunch of other stuff besides. They have an eclectic line-up of series. Oh, like The Muppet Show. 🙂
The press release I received today was about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Science fiction fans know that as the book that was adapted into the film Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott.
BOOM! is adapting the novel to comics. In a massive, twenty-four part series.
The press release was the annoucement that Richard Starkings will be lettering the series. It also has links to the first five pages of the first issue. But if you’re not familiar with the project, the press release gives a good run-down.
Basically, BOOM! is taking the novel and illustrating Dick’s original prose. As they put it, the series “will present the full text of the novel fully illustrated, mixing all new panel-to-panel continuity in an innovative, ground-breaking 24-issue maxi-series experiment.”
Each issue will also have back-matter commentary from a leading comics professional. Warren Ellis was already announced as the writer of the first issue’s back-matter, and the press release lists Matt Fraction as the contributor to the second issue and Ed Brubaker as the contributor to the third.
I said a few months ago that “Philip K. Dick is my crack,” and I’m really curious to see how well the novel translates to comics.
I can’t wait to see it.
Perhaps it is too early for you to know, but will this be a translation similar to what Charles Vess did with Gaiman’s Stardust? It’s the promise of the ‘full text’ with the ‘panel-to-panel continuity’ that makes me wonder just how this is going to come off.
That’s what I was expecting, something like Stardust, but based on the sample pages (though the link to BOOM!’s press release), it looks like a more straightforward visual adaptation, just with more caption boxes. For instance, even the dialogue tags in the original novel get used in the adaptation.