A Scanner Darkly - Alles wird nicht gut

A comic by Schirmer/Mosel? Yes and no. A Scanner Darkly, the 1977 novel by the cult science fiction author Philip K. Dick, was adapted into a film in 2005 by American director Richard Linklater, featuring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in the lead roles. However, what audiences saw in theaters was neither a 'classic' science fiction film like Blade Runner, the most famous of all Dick adaptations, nor what it initially appeared to be: an animated film. Once the film was completed, Linklater subjected it to a digital manipulation technique known as rotoscoping, where real images are overlaid with animated textures. From here, it’s just a small step to a comic: adding speech bubbles to sequences of film images and printing them. Thus, it is a book based on a film that has already been graphically altered in its original material. Philip K. Dick's literary source is well-suited for such visual manipulations. After all, it deals with the replication and loss of identity through drugs—while the fictional high-tech world of the novel adds an additional layer of complexity: the 'hero', a drug enforcement agent, can disguise himself by altering his appearance until he succumbs to the drug and ultimately hunts himself. Visualized and pushed to all media levels, including comics, the fragmentation of personality inexorably takes its course.