Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography

In PKD Territory

Philip K Dick -
A Comics Biography
by Laurent Queyssi & Mauro Marchesi
Nbm graphic novels
Isbn 9781681121918

I’ve read a couple of biographies about my favourite writer over the years (although I’ve not revisited his novels for quite a few decades now... I need to let them back into my life). This one kind of wormed its way into my field of vision as I was perusing the graphic novels and trade paperbacks at Foyles earlier this year and I thought, wow, a comic book version of his life... I’m in.

I was late when I came to Philip K. Dick. It wasn’t ‘til the release of Blade Runner at cinemas in 1982 that I read the original novel of that one, straight after the movie, at the age of 14. Over the next year I acquired and read, almost exclusively from second hand bookshops, maybe 40 or more of his novels and also his collected short stories. Sometimes his concepts were challenging... certainly to a teenager... such as, in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the concept of Mercerism and the empathy boxes... but the ideas and moods in his books are amazing so he’s always remained my favourite over the years.

This comic book version of his life, Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography, is obviously not going to be as detailed or hang together as much as a formally written biography but it does bring together a fairly nice impression, from first and second hand anecdotal evidence, of the man. I mention my own introduction to his writing because of how this graphic novel begins, with Phil travelling to California in December 1981, to visit Ridley Scott who, after some strong misgivings from Dick (left out, the book is necessarily very subjective of how it paints its pictures, so to speak), screens a show reel of assorted parts of the film Blade Runner, around 20 minutes, for him. Two panels in this book show the Off World blimp and the scene where Deckard is running across the rooftop near the end of the movie. Whether these were actually included in that show reel is anybody’s guess but I think this is all Dick got to see of the film which would bring him, posthumously, a whole new surge of interest.

We then jump to Jan 17th 1982, when Phil collapses and is taken to hospital... it’s from this point that the book looks back at the author’s life, segueing from year to year with little and sometimes important moments that build up a picture of the man (for better and worse), every now and again returning to the hospital bed as Phil replays his life before his second, fatal stroke in that same hospital a short time after.

And it’s really nice, starting with the death of his twin sister when they were still babes in arms and showing him put into an incubator to try and save his life, his high school in Berkeley, his job at a record store, his recognition by peers when walking around a sci-fi con when he was just starting out with getting short stories published in magazines by the likes of Anthony Boucher and, later, Harlan Ellison, how he met and broke up with his five wives... and so on.

The art is simple and stunning at the same time and the writer and artist occasionally imbue the images with the same kind of blend of reality and otherwordliness (or perhaps ersatz intrusions might be the best way of describing some of these), such as when he’s reaching into his medicine cabinet to grab some more pills to fuel his writing binge (he wrote and published five novels in one year at one point) but then spraying them with a handy bottle of UBIKTM before he takes them.

And of course, we also have the problematic moments such as the “I was molested as a child” possibility, the visit from the FBI, the break in and burglary of his house and, ultimately, the pink light VALIS experience and his subsequent exegesis. The problematic issues are rendered without any judgement, also showing how he saved his sons life as a toddler due to one of his ‘visions’, accurately predicting a defect he could have no way of knowing and getting the child to a doctor in time. Alongside things such as his struggle to have his ‘serious’ non-sci-fi work published, which bothered him a lot. Frankly, I read those novels when they were finally published posthumously and I loved them as much, if not more, than his speculative fiction. I think he was definitely ahead of his time with his ‘real life’ novels too.

It’s, somewhat of a ramshackle and sad life when you see it represented in these kinds of short and wonderfully illustrated bursts that show the highlights (and lowlights) of a life which was rooted in the mundane but lived out in a realm that, perhaps, only he could see. Whether his long experiences with his visions were a real, mystical phenomenon or just another series of drug flashbacks over the years is anybodys guess and, again, not judged by the steady tone of this comic.

And I think that’s all I really want to say about Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography other than it’s absolutely excellent and even if, like me, you already know a lot of the writer’s personal story, it’s a unique and enriching way of giving the reader a quick overview and I’d recommend this one to anybody who loves Dick’s work. Really glad I picked this one up.