REVIEW: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? #3
Release Date: September 2, 2009
Writer(s): Philip K. Dick
Artist(s): Tony Parker
Cover(s): Bill Sienkiewicz, Moritat, Scott Keating
Colors: Blond
Letterer: Richard Starkings of COMICRAFT
Backmatter: Rockne S. O’Bannon
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Either my mood organ is busted or this issue was bland. Whichever way you cut it, I was left feeling like I hadn’t done anything in the ten-fifteen minutes it took me to go through this issue.
The first half of issue 3 is filled with the aftermath of the Rosens debunking the Voight-Kampff test and Deckard walking right into their tiger pit. They try to bribe him with the promise of the owl he saw walking into the building. They almost have him, too, except for the fact that Rachel keeps referring to the owl as “it” instead of “she”. He sets the machine up for one more test on Rachel, telling her that the case he’s carrying is made of 100% human baby hide. Now Deckard has them by the proverbial pair: She’s a replicant and doesn’t even know it. Deckard thinks she’s probably a Nexus 6 like the andys he’s supposed to track down. If that’s true, finding the remaining androids is going to be tough.
The second half of the ish is the first meeting between Isidore and Pris. He was a chickenhead and she was a half naked android. Not much else to say.
I think it was the second half that really did nothing for me. The first half deals very much with the “Am I really who I think I am, or am I something else” question, and that was interesting. Those kinds of thought experiments are always a good read (and to experience if you don’t mind your head spinning with question after question about what is “real”). Rachel was completely convinced that she was human. Even Deckard was convinced of it for a beat. It brings up the question, how do any of us know for sure that we aren’t just like Rachel? We don’t know if Deckard has thought this yet (mostly, he just seemed to be bummed about not getting an owl and how hard it’s going to be to get his bounty), but it has to come up.
Isidore and Pris, on the other hand, were just meh. I think, in the novel, this wouldn’t be so “meh” because it would be followed up by something. Maybe it was the “women like to cook, it’s in their genes” type of line Isidore was thinking that threw me into the realm of I Could Care Less What’s Happening Here. It could be that it was just a slow moment in the story that, if read in novel format, would be followed up by something more interesting. It could very well have been the fact that Pris introduced herself as “Rachel Rosen”, then completely denied she had when Isidore questioned her about being related to the Rosen family that makes andys. That made me scratch my head, go back and re-read it about three times to make sure I was reading the right words. I didn’t get why she did that. In fact, I thought it actually was Rachel for a minute because the characters looked similar. So I was super confused about the logistics of her getting from her meeting with Deckard to Isidore’s apartment building so fast. I hear the name “Pris” and I expect someone looking more Daryl Hannah-ish!
Everything about this issue is top-notch like the previous two. For me, personally, I can feel the novelty starting to wear off on a novel being spoon-fed to me a comic book issue a month at a time.
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