The Shaping of Things Electric (Stories and Minds)
July 1984: I’m 11 years old when I see Blade Runner on cable TV at a friend’s house.
I can never un-see it.
I watched this film at such a young age, such a formative time in my hard-wiring, that I cannot escape it having an integral (even unconscious) lasting effect on me.
In the same way that The Bible was my introduction to literature as a very young child, my mother reading Bible stories to me at night… I cannot escape the structure and archetypes of its stories in terms of how I tell my own stories and interpret others.
Watching Blade Runner at this early stage is compounded by the fact that I grew up in a house with no television, and I had no access to the cinema. I had little experience of common television and popular film culture, let alone preparation for this level of vision brought to screen. So even though I saw this film two years after it came out, on a tiny television in my childhood friend’s kitchen, at eleven years old… I was moved.
January 1993: I begin work on my first creator-owned comic series Kabuki.
By now I knew that the film Blade Runner was adapted from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I had an appreciation for Philip K. Dick’s use of science fiction to turn the volume up on the quintessential human questions. You can use the future to comment on the present. You can use something non-human as a metaphor to get to the essence of the truly human questions.
November 1994: Kabuki is published. Taking place in near-future Japan, there are nods to Blade Runner in the story (the visuals of “Future Noir”, and the combination of this with what Joseph Campbell would call the classic “Hero’s Journey”, the quest to meet your maker, to discover your true destiny [or programming], the search for your true identity and role in the world). There are conscious nods. And probably unconscious ripple effects on the page as well. And those ripple effects keep happening. Even off of the page. A synchronicity that has its own “organizing principle”.
June 2003: I get a phone call from the producer of the film Waking Life (and producer of the Philip K. Dick film adaptation A Scanner Darkly). His name is Tommy Pallotta. He has picked up Kabuki (Vol 5: Metamorphosis) at a bookstore in New York and asks me to collaborate with Hampton Fancher (Blade Runner Screenwriter) and novelist Jonathon Lethem (who also happens to be a PKD scholar) on a project. Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher & I (with Tommy as producer) are to adapt Jonathon Letham’s novel Amnesia Moon into a kind of animated story.
November 2007: Fast forward. Portland. Bagdad Theater. I’m at lunch with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. We are discussing Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the filming of the adaptation of Chuck’s novel Choke, and an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Ant that I have been asked to write… That Philip K. Dick’s daughters personally have asked me to write. Also we discuss where ideas come from and how projects take shape (including where Philip K. Dick believed his ideas came from). We’ll get back to this.
July 2003: Rewind. The project with Hampton Fancher & Jonathan Lethem (I think it was for Microsoft) doesn’t make it to the finished stage. Also I’m in the middle of writing and drawing Daredevil at Marvel Comics and my publishing schedule obligations limit how much extra work I can do. Producer Tommy Pallotta says we will work on something else in the future.
September 2006: The future. Tommy Pallotta emails me. He has just finished filming the Philip K. Dick film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly (also directed by Waking Life director Richard Linklater). Tommy wants to discuss collaborating on Kabuki as his next film.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. My mother turns to me in the car and tells me that aliens cannot be trusted. That they are evil. This is not in response to any question I asked her. I’m upset by this.
October 2006: Tommy Pallotta & I meet in Los Angeles to discuss. After 20th Century Fox buying the film option for Kabuki four times in a row, hiring me to write the treatment and work with Academy Award winning screenwriter John Sayles on the script, after HBO envisioning Kabuki as a television series, after Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant producer Lawrence Bender proposed a fantastic outside-the-box solution for filming Kabuki in Japan… Tommy and I discuss the possibilities of working together on the Kabuki film.
We also discuss childhood experiences: him being tested and cultivated for psychic powers as a child by an organization in Friendswood, Texas (I know the place because my uncle who works at NASA lives there.)… And my childhood growing up with a mother who became a prayer-healer, a Book of Revelation interpreter, and survivalist preparing for the end-times in a religious movement of her own making.
We also discuss Philip K. Dick.
January 2007: I’m reading a biography of Philip K. Dick, while in the process of working on KABUKI: The Alchemy. I saw the PKD biography by chance at a bookstore and bought it on impulse to read after working on The Alchemy at night before I fall asleep. It is while reading this biography that Tommy Pallotta calls me and says that Philip K. Dick’s daughters Isa and Laura would like to meet me. I had just been reading about them being born in the PKD biography. Ripple effects are happening. Dots are connecting.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. I ask my mother if the Aliens can still go to Heaven when they die. My mother tells me no. She says the aliens cannot go to Heaven.
February 2007: Santa Monica, California I am at lunch with Isa and Laura, Philip K. Dick’s daughters who run Electric Shepherd Productions. Tommy had given them my Kabuki books. He has asked me if I would be interested in adapting PKD into comics and graphic novels. Isa and Laura tell me they like my work in Kabuki and would entrust me to adapt their father’s work.
July 1984: I’m 11 yrs old. Watching Blade Runner on a small television in a friend’s kitchen in Kentucky.
February 2007: Santa Monica. Tommy and I Bike-riding along the beach through Venice, Malibu, to Manhattan Beach in LA, all the while trying to figure out what will be the best way to adapt Philip K. Dick stories into comic book & graphic novel form. We enlist the help of novelist Jonathan Lethem (who has an incredible knowledge of PKD and his work), and the three of us comb through the works of Philip K. Dick in search of what we think can be the right PKD story to begin an original adaptation into comic book form. We all reach one conclusion. Electric Ant.
A Tale of Ants & Sheep (The Electric Variety): Electric Ant is a story by Philip K. Dick that was published in 1969. The germ of the idea of Electric Ant became the DNA forDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the film Blade Runner was based. Philip K. Dick would at times build upon ideas explored in his short stories, and develop the concept in new directions, or from a different perspective, in the larger format of a novel.
We (novelist Jonathan Lethem, producer Tommy Pallotta, and myself) chose this story as our first choice for adaptation of PKD into comics because we felt the story has what we considered the classic quintessential Philip K. Dickian themes. The story asks the enduring existential questions: Who am I? Who created me? What was I created for? Do I have free will? Am I limited by my programming? Can I evolve into something beyond my original programming? What is reality? Is the way I perceive reality different than a fixed reality? Can I alter my perceptions to transcend my ego and programming limitations and see a pure reality? Does my internal reality affect the external reality? Which is more real?
It was most important to me to be respectful to Philip K. Dick’s story, to communicate the themes by taking advantage of the new opportunities that the comic book medium offers, and that my version would ring true to his daughters Laura and Isa. I cannot describe how happy I was that Philip K. Dick’s daughters liked the script that I wrote. That meant everything to me.
From the beginning, the adaptation is planned to be very true to the original story, but there is more room to develop things in the comic book form that are only hinted at in the short story. In this case, that was one of the advantages of adapting a short story instead of a novel. In adapting a novel to film or graphic novel, you may have to edit it down. It can be a reductive process. With Electric Ant, I was able to let it develop organically into the new format in ways that expand on ideas and scenes that are only hinted at in the short story.
The moving parts of Electric Ant go like this: A man wakes up in the hospital from a traffic accident only to have the doctor tell him they cannot treat him because he is a robot. Naturally, this raises a lot of questions. Who made him? Who owns him? What is his program? Can he alter it? Has he been walking around seeing things differently than they really are? And once he learns how his reality functions… what if he begins to tinker with that? How much of reality does that really effect? What are the external ripple effects to what you change inside yourself?
All very human questions at their core… but made immediate and visceral through the metaphor of artificial intelligence. The metaphor itself asking the question: “What is artificial?” In terms of… “What is reality?”
I wrote the script adaptation of Electric Ant that I would write if I were turning the story into a film. It is not planned to be identical to the short story, but we decided early on that it was going to be very true to the source material. We did not want to change it into a different story with only minor similarities. Everything in the short story is adapted into this version, but things that are suggested in the original story are given more room to breathe and evolve. Some ideas and details that are mentioned only once at the beginning of the short story, now have room to return with a twist. And there is a sort of love story that developed. It is not an action story, though there is action in it. It became a kind of mystery, and a love story, with the mystery being the existential questions that are now made very real and immediate that the protagonist must strive to answer. That is one of the fascinating opportunities in Science Fiction, particularly in how Philip K. Dick approached it: Take the existential questions of life, and through the metaphors of futurism, make them the practical, necessary, visceral, questions that propel the story and demand answers to satisfy the characters’ immediate hierarchy of needs.
The biggest challenge of adaptation was that in the Electric Ant short story, the main character is mostly alone, thinking to himself (interestingly, this parallels how Screenwriter Hampton Fancher first envisioned the adaptation of Electric Sheep for the Blade Runner script). The characters of Danceman & Sarah are in the Electric Ant short story, but briefly. In my comic book adaptation, I let the characters of Sarah & Danceman develop more as they gave opportunity for the protagonist to voice his thoughts through interaction and discussion with these external characters, instead of him thinking most of the action the way it happened in the original short story. This afforded more visual opportunity for interaction between the characters and room for all of the characters to develop because of that, and it lead to the biggest change from the source material, in that there is a kind of love story that evolves in the adaptation. This lets the action externalize and lends itself to the visual language of the new medium.
Externalizing the world of the main character in Electric Ant also gave an opportunity to further flesh out the world in a kind of Philip K. Dick universe or continuum that alludes to other Dickian ideas, themes, names & nods to details from his other books (suggesting perhaps that there is a possible interconnection).
The term “Electric Ant” refers to the characters of artificial intelligence (who mostly do not know they are not the real McCoy). In my adaptation, that term (Electric Ant) is used as a slang or slur term for these characters by the biological population. Of course in order to do that, there needs to be a more clinical term that precedes the slang. I decided to not introduce an unrelated name, but instead keep the spelling of Electric Ant intact, but push the words together. I introduced the clinical term for the model as an “Electricant” (with “Electric Ant” being the slang variation). Just as the Electric Ant story was the precursor for the novel Electric Sheep which became Blade Runner… the “Electricant” is the earlier, less sophisticated robotic model of the “Replicant”.
As such, the term is an example of suggesting thru-lines to an external world of the story (and the literary and filmic world of PKD), taking into consideration that most people know of Philip K. Dick through Blade Runner as their port of entry to his work.
February 2007: Santa Monica, California. Laura and Isa tell me they like my take on Electric Ant. Over lunch they mention that some publishers have heard inside word that we are developing Electric Ant and that I am writing it, and they have received publishing offers for the project. As of yet I’ve been working only directly with the Dick Estate: Isa and Laura, with Tommy Pallotta orchestrating it all. No publishers are yet involved.
I mention to Laura and Isa that Marvel has had success in adapting Stephen King to comic books published through Marvel Comics. I offer that Marvel is the largest comic book publisher in the States, that I write for Marvel, and my book Kabuki is published at Marvel, and it may be a great opportunity for Marvel to publish Philip K. Dick in the form of the Electric Ant story we have developed. Isa and Laura are intrigued and they give me their blessing to personally discuss the idea with Marvel.
February 2007: New York. The Marvel Comics offices. 417 Fifth Ave. 10th floor. It is the Monday after the New York Comicon. I’ve just left the flat Iron Building from a meeting with my editor at Macmillan the publisher of my childrens’ book The Shy Creatures (about a shy girl who is a veterinarian to mythological and cryptozoological creatures). I’m here for a meeting with Marvel Comics publisher Dan Buckley. I tell him our plan for Electric Ant and he likes it.
The Marvel Comics House of Ideas and the Philip K. Dick estate / Electric Shepherd Productions are officially introduced. Thus begins months of legalese in terms of a publishing agreement.
November 2007: I’m given a green light for Electric Ant at Marvel. I meet with my dear friend, writer Brian Michael Bendis in Portland. He is enlisted on the team as a special editor on the project, and he gives me feedback that helps me finesse the script (we literally sit down at his house watching Blade Runner together including all the special features from the box set and discuss the mechanics of visual storytelling and adaptation). I know my artist friend Paul Pope is a big PKD fan so I ask if he would like to contribute art for the project. Pope is in for doing the covers. Artist Pascal Alixe from Paris is capable of drawing in a multitude of style variations and he is selected to do the art for the series because there are a variety of realities and reality changes in the story that can be reflected by his visual dexterity in art-style shifts. I have late night discussions with my comic book godfather and mentor Jim Steranko. Like with Brian Bendis, just talking to Steranko makes me smarter and gives invaluable perspective on whatever I am working on. Art pages of the script begins to come in. I rewrite the script to accommodate unforeseen artistic details. This project goes from coincidence, to synchronicity, to idea, to three-dimensional physical material reality. Kind of like the structure of the story of Electric Ant itself.
July 2008: Marvel editors Mark Paniccia & Charlie Beckerman email that Marvel needs an advance image for Electric Ant to use for the cover and advance promotion (including a presence at San Diego Comicon). I do a painting for the cover of Electric Ant; the character tinkering with the internal gizmos in his chest.
The idea of programming in Electric Ant, that the character has an unwinding tape of what he perceives as reality preset inside of him, the idea that he has natural inclinations for what he is “hard wired” to do, to see, to enjoy, to pursue, is a metaphor that I think most humans can relate too. Also the idea that there are things in his program that are naturally edited out of his daily narrative before they make it to his conscious frontal awareness, is also, I think, comparable to the unconscious and conscious editing that happens with all of us on a daily basis.
Once we become aware that our reality is limited by these things: what we perceive, what we project, and that we have blind spots about things that we are not perceiving… that epiphany that we are not at all living in one objective linear reality because of our blind spots and our programming (from nature and nurture)… when we become aware of these things, and that our reality can indeed be influenced by our own thought and actions more than we realized, we then have a liberty and a responsibility, even a mission, to be more consciously intent about how we create the narrative of our lives.
I think this surfaces as one of the themes in Electric Ant and I tried to crystallize that in the painting of the cover.
November 2007: Portland. Bagdad Theater. Lunch with Chuck Palaniuk. We discuss where ideas come from. Chuck says he has been writing his new book all morning as if he is in a trance. We discuss writing as a form of meditation. And as an idea that begins inside us then begins to affect our material world the more we act on it. The idea that we begin with a compulsion, and once the writing happens, the rest of the ideas show up. I mention that William Gibson said something to the effect that when he is writing, its not just the conscious version of him that is talking to you now, it is that person in collaboration with another part of him that he does not always have reliable access to but that hopefully shows up when he begins writing. I discuss with Chuck how Philip K. Dick crystallizes the concepts we are discussing… through his work, his work methods, his religious experience, and his vast body of work as a whole, having cascading influence into the realms of fiction and popular culture entertainment, and but also prescience of our culture as a whole and what it has become. It is as if you have your own personal ideas and conscious programming, but also an “organizing principle” that shows up when your conscious and unconscious programming are in sync.
That synchronicity of conscious and unconscious tends to occur when you are able to immerse yourself into a kind of focus or meditation. Writing can do this. So can painting, drawing, sculpture or the focused physical labor of a craft or exercise.
Also I ask Chuck about the character’s mother’s name of Ida in his book Choke. Because my mother’s name was also Ida and there was a dynamic in that book with adventures of the mother & child living on the fringe of things that I related to.
June 2008: Los Angeles. Chateau Marmont. Tommy and I meet with Isa and Kalen of Electric Shepherd productions. Isa gives me the go ahead to begin writing a film treatment for Electric Ant.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. I ask my mother, “If the Aliens pray to God and get “saved’ can they then go to Heaven”? My mother tells me no. She says the aliens are evil and they cannot be “saved”. She says they cannot go to heaven.
I’m disappointed.
2010: Electric Ant the comic book comes out from Marvel. It’s become real in the three dimensional material world. Then the Hardcover collection and now the paperback. Each book an idea delivery system of PKD’s concepts to new readers across time.
April 2010: San Francsicso. Wondercon. I’m signing books at the convention. Isa stops by with her children. Philip K. Dick’s grandchildren. They are a delight. I give them a copy of my children’s book The Shy Creatures. We have our picture taken together. I remember that I was their age when I first saw Blade Runner. I lose myself in a moment fascinated by the ripple effects. I think of the metaphor in Electric Ant of changing your reality on the inside and seeing that manifest itself externally in the three dimensional material world.
April 1982: I’m 9 years old. Disappointed and confused about the aliens not being able to get into Heaven, I ask my mother: “What about robots? Can robots go to Heaven?”
David Mack
Tri-Plan Electronics/Idea Space
February 2011
![drdavidmrmack:
Introduction I wrote for Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Shaping of Things Electric (Stories and Minds)
July 1984: I’m 11 years old when I see Blade Runner on cable TV at a friend’s house.
I can never un-see it.
I watched this film at such a young age, such a formative time in my hard-wiring, that I cannot escape it having an integral (even unconscious) lasting effect on me.
In the same way that The Bible was my introduction to literature as a very young child, my mother reading Bible stories to me at night… I cannot escape the structure and archetypes of its stories in terms of how I tell my own stories and interpret others.
Watching Blade Runner at this early stage is compounded by the fact that I grew up in a house with no television, and I had no access to the cinema. I had little experience of common television and popular film culture, let alone preparation for this level of vision brought to screen. So even though I saw this film two years after it came out, on a tiny television in my childhood friend’s kitchen, at eleven years old… I was moved.
January 1993: I begin work on my first creator-owned comic series Kabuki.
By now I knew that the film Blade Runner was adapted from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I had an appreciation for Philip K. Dick’s use of science fiction to turn the volume up on the quintessential human questions. You can use the future to comment on the present. You can use something non-human as a metaphor to get to the essence of the truly human questions.
November 1994: Kabuki is published. Taking place in near-future Japan, there are nods to Blade Runner in the story (the visuals of “Future Noir”, and the combination of this with what Joseph Campbell would call the classic “Hero’s Journey”, the quest to meet your maker, to discover your true destiny [or programming], the search for your true identity and role in the world). There are conscious nods. And probably unconscious ripple effects on the page as well. And those ripple effects keep happening. Even off of the page. A synchronicity that has its own “organizing principle”.
June 2003: I get a phone call from the producer of the film Waking Life (and producer of the Philip K. Dick film adaptation A Scanner Darkly). His name is Tommy Pallotta. He has picked up Kabuki (Vol 5: Metamorphosis) at a bookstore in New York and asks me to collaborate with Hampton Fancher (Blade Runner Screenwriter) and novelist Jonathon Lethem (who also happens to be a PKD scholar) on a project. Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher & I (with Tommy as producer) are to adapt Jonathon Letham’s novel Amnesia Moon into a kind of animated story.
November 2007: Fast forward. Portland. Bagdad Theater. I’m at lunch with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. We are discussing Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the filming of the adaptation of Chuck’s novel Choke, and an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Ant that I have been asked to write… That Philip K. Dick’s daughters personally have asked me to write. Also we discuss where ideas come from and how projects take shape (including where Philip K. Dick believed his ideas came from). We’ll get back to this.
July 2003: Rewind. The project with Hampton Fancher & Jonathan Lethem (I think it was for Microsoft) doesn’t make it to the finished stage. Also I’m in the middle of writing and drawing Daredevil at Marvel Comics and my publishing schedule obligations limit how much extra work I can do. Producer Tommy Pallotta says we will work on something else in the future.
September 2006: The future. Tommy Pallotta emails me. He has just finished filming the Philip K. Dick film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly (also directed by Waking Life director Richard Linklater). Tommy wants to discuss collaborating on Kabuki as his next film.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. My mother turns to me in the car and tells me that aliens cannot be trusted. That they are evil. This is not in response to any question I asked her. I’m upset by this.
October 2006: Tommy Pallotta & I meet in Los Angeles to discuss. After 20th Century Fox buying the film option for Kabuki four times in a row, hiring me to write the treatment and work with Academy Award winning screenwriter John Sayles on the script, after HBO envisioning Kabuki as a television series, after Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant producer Lawrence Bender proposed a fantastic outside-the-box solution for filming Kabuki in Japan… Tommy and I discuss the possibilities of working together on the Kabuki film.
We also discuss childhood experiences: him being tested and cultivated for psychic powers as a child by an organization in Friendswood, Texas (I know the place because my uncle who works at NASA lives there.)… And my childhood growing up with a mother who became a prayer-healer, a Book of Revelation interpreter, and survivalist preparing for the end-times in a religious movement of her own making.
We also discuss Philip K. Dick.
January 2007: I’m reading a biography of Philip K. Dick, while in the process of working on KABUKI: The Alchemy. I saw the PKD biography by chance at a bookstore and bought it on impulse to read after working on The Alchemy at night before I fall asleep. It is while reading this biography that Tommy Pallotta calls me and says that Philip K. Dick’s daughters Isa and Laura would like to meet me. I had just been reading about them being born in the PKD biography. Ripple effects are happening. Dots are connecting.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. I ask my mother if the Aliens can still go to Heaven when they die. My mother tells me no. She says the aliens cannot go to Heaven.
February 2007: Santa Monica, California I am at lunch with Isa and Laura, Philip K. Dick’s daughters who run Electric Shepherd Productions. Tommy had given them my Kabuki books. He has asked me if I would be interested in adapting PKD into comics and graphic novels. Isa and Laura tell me they like my work in Kabuki and would entrust me to adapt their father’s work.
July 1984: I’m 11 yrs old. Watching Blade Runner on a small television in a friend’s kitchen in Kentucky.
February 2007: Santa Monica. Tommy and I Bike-riding along the beach through Venice, Malibu, to Manhattan Beach in LA, all the while trying to figure out what will be the best way to adapt Philip K. Dick stories into comic book & graphic novel form. We enlist the help of novelist Jonathan Lethem (who has an incredible knowledge of PKD and his work), and the three of us comb through the works of Philip K. Dick in search of what we think can be the right PKD story to begin an original adaptation into comic book form. We all reach one conclusion. Electric Ant.
A Tale of Ants & Sheep (The Electric Variety): Electric Ant is a story by Philip K. Dick that was published in 1969. The germ of the idea of Electric Ant became the DNA forDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the film Blade Runner was based. Philip K. Dick would at times build upon ideas explored in his short stories, and develop the concept in new directions, or from a different perspective, in the larger format of a novel.
We (novelist Jonathan Lethem, producer Tommy Pallotta, and myself) chose this story as our first choice for adaptation of PKD into comics because we felt the story has what we considered the classic quintessential Philip K. Dickian themes. The story asks the enduring existential questions: Who am I? Who created me? What was I created for? Do I have free will? Am I limited by my programming? Can I evolve into something beyond my original programming? What is reality? Is the way I perceive reality different than a fixed reality? Can I alter my perceptions to transcend my ego and programming limitations and see a pure reality? Does my internal reality affect the external reality? Which is more real?
It was most important to me to be respectful to Philip K. Dick’s story, to communicate the themes by taking advantage of the new opportunities that the comic book medium offers, and that my version would ring true to his daughters Laura and Isa. I cannot describe how happy I was that Philip K. Dick’s daughters liked the script that I wrote. That meant everything to me.
From the beginning, the adaptation is planned to be very true to the original story, but there is more room to develop things in the comic book form that are only hinted at in the short story. In this case, that was one of the advantages of adapting a short story instead of a novel. In adapting a novel to film or graphic novel, you may have to edit it down. It can be a reductive process. With Electric Ant, I was able to let it develop organically into the new format in ways that expand on ideas and scenes that are only hinted at in the short story.
The moving parts of Electric Ant go like this: A man wakes up in the hospital from a traffic accident only to have the doctor tell him they cannot treat him because he is a robot. Naturally, this raises a lot of questions. Who made him? Who owns him? What is his program? Can he alter it? Has he been walking around seeing things differently than they really are? And once he learns how his reality functions… what if he begins to tinker with that? How much of reality does that really effect? What are the external ripple effects to what you change inside yourself?
All very human questions at their core… but made immediate and visceral through the metaphor of artificial intelligence. The metaphor itself asking the question: “What is artificial?” In terms of… “What is reality?”
I wrote the script adaptation of Electric Ant that I would write if I were turning the story into a film. It is not planned to be identical to the short story, but we decided early on that it was going to be very true to the source material. We did not want to change it into a different story with only minor similarities. Everything in the short story is adapted into this version, but things that are suggested in the original story are given more room to breathe and evolve. Some ideas and details that are mentioned only once at the beginning of the short story, now have room to return with a twist. And there is a sort of love story that developed. It is not an action story, though there is action in it. It became a kind of mystery, and a love story, with the mystery being the existential questions that are now made very real and immediate that the protagonist must strive to answer. That is one of the fascinating opportunities in Science Fiction, particularly in how Philip K. Dick approached it: Take the existential questions of life, and through the metaphors of futurism, make them the practical, necessary, visceral, questions that propel the story and demand answers to satisfy the characters’ immediate hierarchy of needs.
The biggest challenge of adaptation was that in the Electric Ant short story, the main character is mostly alone, thinking to himself (interestingly, this parallels how Screenwriter Hampton Fancher first envisioned the adaptation of Electric Sheep for the Blade Runner script). The characters of Danceman & Sarah are in the Electric Ant short story, but briefly. In my comic book adaptation, I let the characters of Sarah & Danceman develop more as they gave opportunity for the protagonist to voice his thoughts through interaction and discussion with these external characters, instead of him thinking most of the action the way it happened in the original short story. This afforded more visual opportunity for interaction between the characters and room for all of the characters to develop because of that, and it lead to the biggest change from the source material, in that there is a kind of love story that evolves in the adaptation. This lets the action externalize and lends itself to the visual language of the new medium.
Externalizing the world of the main character in Electric Ant also gave an opportunity to further flesh out the world in a kind of Philip K. Dick universe or continuum that alludes to other Dickian ideas, themes, names & nods to details from his other books (suggesting perhaps that there is a possible interconnection).
The term “Electric Ant” refers to the characters of artificial intelligence (who mostly do not know they are not the real McCoy). In my adaptation, that term (Electric Ant) is used as a slang or slur term for these characters by the biological population. Of course in order to do that, there needs to be a more clinical term that precedes the slang. I decided to not introduce an unrelated name, but instead keep the spelling of Electric Ant intact, but push the words together. I introduced the clinical term for the model as an “Electricant” (with “Electric Ant” being the slang variation). Just as the Electric Ant story was the precursor for the novel Electric Sheep which became Blade Runner… the “Electricant” is the earlier, less sophisticated robotic model of the “Replicant”.
As such, the term is an example of suggesting thru-lines to an external world of the story (and the literary and filmic world of PKD), taking into consideration that most people know of Philip K. Dick through Blade Runner as their port of entry to his work.
February 2007: Santa Monica, California. Laura and Isa tell me they like my take on Electric Ant. Over lunch they mention that some publishers have heard inside word that we are developing Electric Ant and that I am writing it, and they have received publishing offers for the project. As of yet I’ve been working only directly with the Dick Estate: Isa and Laura, with Tommy Pallotta orchestrating it all. No publishers are yet involved.
I mention to Laura and Isa that Marvel has had success in adapting Stephen King to comic books published through Marvel Comics. I offer that Marvel is the largest comic book publisher in the States, that I write for Marvel, and my book Kabuki is published at Marvel, and it may be a great opportunity for Marvel to publish Philip K. Dick in the form of the Electric Ant story we have developed. Isa and Laura are intrigued and they give me their blessing to personally discuss the idea with Marvel.
February 2007: New York. The Marvel Comics offices. 417 Fifth Ave. 10th floor. It is the Monday after the New York Comicon. I’ve just left the flat Iron Building from a meeting with my editor at Macmillan the publisher of my childrens’ book The Shy Creatures (about a shy girl who is a veterinarian to mythological and cryptozoological creatures). I’m here for a meeting with Marvel Comics publisher Dan Buckley. I tell him our plan for Electric Ant and he likes it.
The Marvel Comics House of Ideas and the Philip K. Dick estate / Electric Shepherd Productions are officially introduced. Thus begins months of legalese in terms of a publishing agreement.
November 2007: I’m given a green light for Electric Ant at Marvel. I meet with my dear friend, writer Brian Michael Bendis in Portland. He is enlisted on the team as a special editor on the project, and he gives me feedback that helps me finesse the script (we literally sit down at his house watching Blade Runner together including all the special features from the box set and discuss the mechanics of visual storytelling and adaptation). I know my artist friend Paul Pope is a big PKD fan so I ask if he would like to contribute art for the project. Pope is in for doing the covers. Artist Pascal Alixe from Paris is capable of drawing in a multitude of style variations and he is selected to do the art for the series because there are a variety of realities and reality changes in the story that can be reflected by his visual dexterity in art-style shifts. I have late night discussions with my comic book godfather and mentor Jim Steranko. Like with Brian Bendis, just talking to Steranko makes me smarter and gives invaluable perspective on whatever I am working on. Art pages of the script begins to come in. I rewrite the script to accommodate unforeseen artistic details. This project goes from coincidence, to synchronicity, to idea, to three-dimensional physical material reality. Kind of like the structure of the story of Electric Ant itself.
July 2008: Marvel editors Mark Paniccia & Charlie Beckerman email that Marvel needs an advance image for Electric Ant to use for the cover and advance promotion (including a presence at San Diego Comicon). I do a painting for the cover of Electric Ant; the character tinkering with the internal gizmos in his chest.
The idea of programming in Electric Ant, that the character has an unwinding tape of what he perceives as reality preset inside of him, the idea that he has natural inclinations for what he is “hard wired” to do, to see, to enjoy, to pursue, is a metaphor that I think most humans can relate too. Also the idea that there are things in his program that are naturally edited out of his daily narrative before they make it to his conscious frontal awareness, is also, I think, comparable to the unconscious and conscious editing that happens with all of us on a daily basis.
Once we become aware that our reality is limited by these things: what we perceive, what we project, and that we have blind spots about things that we are not perceiving… that epiphany that we are not at all living in one objective linear reality because of our blind spots and our programming (from nature and nurture)… when we become aware of these things, and that our reality can indeed be influenced by our own thought and actions more than we realized, we then have a liberty and a responsibility, even a mission, to be more consciously intent about how we create the narrative of our lives.
I think this surfaces as one of the themes in Electric Ant and I tried to crystallize that in the painting of the cover.
November 2007: Portland. Bagdad Theater. Lunch with Chuck Palaniuk. We discuss where ideas come from. Chuck says he has been writing his new book all morning as if he is in a trance. We discuss writing as a form of meditation. And as an idea that begins inside us then begins to affect our material world the more we act on it. The idea that we begin with a compulsion, and once the writing happens, the rest of the ideas show up. I mention that William Gibson said something to the effect that when he is writing, its not just the conscious version of him that is talking to you now, it is that person in collaboration with another part of him that he does not always have reliable access to but that hopefully shows up when he begins writing. I discuss with Chuck how Philip K. Dick crystallizes the concepts we are discussing… through his work, his work methods, his religious experience, and his vast body of work as a whole, having cascading influence into the realms of fiction and popular culture entertainment, and but also prescience of our culture as a whole and what it has become. It is as if you have your own personal ideas and conscious programming, but also an “organizing principle” that shows up when your conscious and unconscious programming are in sync.
That synchronicity of conscious and unconscious tends to occur when you are able to immerse yourself into a kind of focus or meditation. Writing can do this. So can painting, drawing, sculpture or the focused physical labor of a craft or exercise.
Also I ask Chuck about the character’s mother’s name of Ida in his book Choke. Because my mother’s name was also Ida and there was a dynamic in that book with adventures of the mother & child living on the fringe of things that I related to.
June 2008: Los Angeles. Chateau Marmont. Tommy and I meet with Isa and Kalen of Electric Shepherd productions. Isa gives me the go ahead to begin writing a film treatment for Electric Ant.
April 1982: I am 9 years old. I ask my mother, “If the Aliens pray to God and get “saved’ can they then go to Heaven”? My mother tells me no. She says the aliens are evil and they cannot be “saved”. She says they cannot go to heaven.
I’m disappointed.
2010: Electric Ant the comic book comes out from Marvel. It’s become real in the three dimensional material world. Then the Hardcover collection and now the paperback. Each book an idea delivery system of PKD’s concepts to new readers across time.
April 2010: San Francsicso. Wondercon. I’m signing books at the convention. Isa stops by with her children. Philip K. Dick’s grandchildren. They are a delight. I give them a copy of my children’s book The Shy Creatures. We have our picture taken together. I remember that I was their age when I first saw Blade Runner. I lose myself in a moment fascinated by the ripple effects. I think of the metaphor in Electric Ant of changing your reality on the inside and seeing that manifest itself externally in the three dimensional material world.
April 1982: I’m 9 years old. Disappointed and confused about the aliens not being able to get into Heaven, I ask my mother: “What about robots? Can robots go to Heaven?”
David Mack
Tri-Plan Electronics/Idea Space
February 2011
drdavidmrmack:
My adaptation of Philip K. Dick into comic books. Electric Ant from Marvel. I have only two of these hardcover collections left at C2E2 Chicago for Sunday. Has extra features, cover art and bonus art designs by Paul Pope. I have original art at my table. Almost out of Daredevil: End of Days Hardcover, The Neil Gaiman prints are a big hit. And the KABUKI trades & Art book. Also, 38 hrs left on this kickstarter of my new art book MUSE if you want in on the book, prints, shirt, at the special price https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/337503446/david-mack-muse-life-drawings-2012-2014
drdavidmrmack:
brianmichaelbendis:
Electric Ant by David Mack
The cover to the hardcover collection from Marvel of my adaptation of Sci-Fi master Philip K. Dick. We chose Electric Ant because it dealt with quintessential PKD themes. It’s also the short story that was the germ of the idea for the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the basis for the film Blade Runner.
I worked directly with Philip K. Dick’s daughters Laura & Isa of the PKD estate and Electric Shepherd productions. We were working on it already, when I offered the project to Marvel with their blessing. Producer Tommy Pallotta (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) introduced my work to Isa & Laura and helped shape the production of the project.
We had our choice of the vast amount of PKD stories to choose from, and he & I, along with author Jonathan Lethem, combed the stories to pick this one for this project.
Here is a note on the making of the project that I wrote for an essay in the new collection of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-mack/the-shaping-of-things-electric-stories-minds-introduction-i-wrote-for-philip-k-d/10150757515530470](http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7ql1sBPxx1qb4nw6o1_500.jpg)
