"Blade Runner" To Be Replicated

"The report read 'Routine retirement of a replicant.' That didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back. " I've always liked Blade Runner; not necessarily for the movie's sake itself (although it is quite good), as much as the fact that it introduced me to the works of Phillip K. Dick, who became my go-to book guy for a few years. After a little while, though, I started to notice something; well, a couple of things, actually. One, the books were consistently better than the movies, usually with significant differences, and two, people my age enjoyed the movies much more than the books. I never fully understood why; even though Dick's books can deal with very explicit topics, for some reason I always looked at them as literature for boys my age, like "Treasure Island" and "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" for children in those generations.

Well, maybe BOOM! Studios can change all that, as they've announced that starting this June, they'll be releasing a 24-issue maxi-series comic adaption of "Blade Runner" inspiration "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" Pretty sweet, although there is one slight difference from the usual methodology for this sort of thing - rather than an "adaption" per se, the series will be an actual translation, with text taken directly out of the book, unaltered. Which I guess makes this an Illustrated Classic, really. Even better! Nothing like pictures to help a pre-teen really get caught up in a story about an ex-blade runner living in a post-nuclear-war world who's hired to track down six androids who think they're human and have gone rogue. And the first issue has backmatter by Warren Ellis!

To be honest, this is just the next in a long line of recent book-to-comic translation/adaptions that I've applauded, including all the Trojan War series (Age of Bronze, The Odyssey, etc.), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Moby Dick…maybe at this rate, kids'll get interested in something that's not sponsored by Disney.