To some extent, Comics exist to eliminate the adverb. There is never a reason to write a caption explaining “Flash ran swiftly” or “Jesse Custer yelled angrily”; that’s what all those funny pictures next to the words are for. If you can’t tell how the guys doing what they do are in fact doing what they do, than it’s not a comic, or at least it’s not much of one. The very reason comics exist as a medium is that they communicate this “how” of action, the feeling of movement over time, not through letters and words by through symbols and art.

How surprising then to pick up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep and be bombarded by a flurry of adverbs, a cornucopia of “explained softlys”, and “said sleeklys”. Frankly, I almost dropped my book to call the Scott McLeod hotline and report this egregious break of protocols. Of course, the words featured in this comic were not meant to the comic form—this is a letter by letter adaption of the original PKD work; however, that set up does not negate a gestalt consideration of the book on its own merits. They put it out as a comic; I was damn well going to judge it as a comic, and I was prepared to excoriate it thoroughly for using words when images or dialogue should’ve carried the story line.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the formulaically snippy review: PKD’s plot began to match the format. It was obvious that what I was reading was neither a comic nor a novel, but something uncomfortably posed in between. What became striking was that through this oddly amorphous window I was viewing a world of oddly amorphous characters—a world of men and women that were also stuck uncomfortably posed between being authentic and being synthetic. The squirm of the descriptions pasted on the pictures matched lovingly with the squirm of humanity pasted on the android.

As such, consciously or not, the addition of all those unnecessary adverbs began to heighten the haunting experience of reading the book, elevating it above both a simple novel, or a simple comic. The tension between the formats became the tension within the characters, became the tension within me, a slick shiver of true emotion that tied me directly to the story, and made me want to read more. It’s an act of postmodern acrobatics that would’ve made old, crazy PKD smile. Sorry, I mean, it’s an act of postmodern acrobatics that would’ve made old, crazy PKD smile sleekly.