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Have you ever read any of Philip K. Dick’s novels? Well you’ll get the chance if you pick up Boom Studio’s complete text copy of Do Androids of Electric Sheep. It’s not your standard book, it’s a comic book. A comic book with every single word from the novel in the comic. 

Boom Studios is putting out some very interesting comics. They’ve picked up “The Incredibles” as well as other fun titles. Most recently I came across a book which I thought was another comic-to-film adaptation. I picked up the first issue of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (DADES)” I glanced at a few pages and then read the front page, which stated “This series is the complete text of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, presented in graphic form.” Take a second and think about that. It’s the complete text, they are putting the text of the novel into a comic book.

The series is being solicited as a maxi-series as opposed to a mini-series. A mini-series is usually up to eight issues. The DADES series is going to be twenty-four issues and will carry the complete text from the novel along with comic panels. That is going to be one impressive feat and something that could not be accomplished in eight issues. If it were to happen in eight issues you can imagine the writers would have to cut out large chunks of text from the novel. But what still catches my attention is the concept of ‘complete text’ in a comic book.

This company is taking the text of a novel and placing them into a comic book. They aren’t paraphrasing and they aren’t summarizing. They are placing the text on the page along with the dialog balloons of the characters in the scene. Reading the issue was odd at first. There’s the narrator and then the character’s speaking, which is jarring at first on a comic, but standard in a novel. I imagine that if reading it regularly a person would get use to it, but it’s so strange to have narration text that doesn’t belong to a character in the book.

This is an exciting prospect. I’m not familiar with any other comics that have done this, so to see this is exciting. I’m not a huge fan of Philip K. Dick, only because I haven’t yet read a lot of his stuff. I’m still trying to finish the original version of DADES. While I might finish it in the following month, there is going to be plenty of time for me to pick up the issues. Twenty-four issues does sound like a lot but since it’s so close to the book, I might just pick them up and compare them to the book, just in case. I mean the complete text in 24 issues, how are they going to do that?