Philip K. Dick was one of my favorite writers and probably the last SF writer that I read as diligently and as exhaustively as I could. I loved the way he side-stepped genre to write about the perception of the self, about faith, about the way we construct the world surrounding us by imposing narratives on it. There might be greater novels written about the themes he approached, but I don’t think there are many as infecting as his.

And there has been much said and written about Dick’s influence over literature, over film, over pop-culture, but little about his echoes in comics - of which there are many.

Jumping over the really obvious and going into the unsubtle, there’s Grant Morrison. Morrison’s work is a melting pot of influence, which in recent years sadly sublimated into something unappealing, bringing in Michael Moorcock, Williams S. Burroughs, Alasdair Gray, Bryan Talbot, Alan Moore and Dick himself. Although garnishing his works with elements of the Occult and Eastern mysticism, rather than christian ones, a lot of them have characters placed in a world degraded by a malevolent Demiurge. The reference to VALIS in The Invisibles #20 is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if the reality bending on which his plots often hinge usually pays lip-reference to the Cthulhu mythos (the kings of the Outer Church, the Lloigor from Zenith, his treatment of Darkseid in Final Crisis, the creatures from Nameless), this is little more than misdirection. The horrors are not of scales, but, as in Dick’s work, of competing narratives.

On a similar note arrives Ales Kot. In the beginning he started as a Grant Morrison epigone, in a stream of Grant Morrison epigones, but he quickly carved out a place for himself. While Dick was writing at the advent of postmodernity, catching visionary glimpses into the world to come, Kot has the advantage of hindsight and he grabs it tightly, engaging with the theory that came to describe what Dick only intuited. The way Kot claims as his own comics like Wild Children, Change, or The Surface is through his unapologetically politicization, his agglutination of cutting edge societal trends and his fixation on the cyclical nature of violence.

Coming earlier from the same stream of Grant Morrison epigones, Nick Spencer wears the influences on his sleeves. A character cites The Invisibles in one of the first pages of his long-running series The Morning Glories. His Dick influence might be second-hand, coming from Morrison, Lost, The Matrix, ending up simply iterating on and not engaging with the subjects and themes, but they still are very much present in comics like Infinite Vacation where alternate realities are purchasable through apps, Existence 2.0/3.0 where identity leaps from body to body or in The Morning Glories series which tackles a whole manner of Dickian subjects.

Six-Gun Gorilla by Simon Spurrier and Jeff Stokely. This was a comic that fell victim to the ridiculousness of it’s eponymous character. At first I thought that it would just be some of that “fun comics” that aren’t really that fun no matter how much guys like Chris Sims shout about it. But in reality it comes with some really great SF world building, with a clear thematic point, good characters and pretty neat cartooning. More than that, it takes place in a world where reality is fluid and it mingles with fiction in order to question the power fantasies that such comics are created to enact,

The Wrenchies is too disjointed and uneven to fully enjoy, no matter how good portions of it are. But some of the best segments reminded me strongly of Dick. There’s that horror of being at the whims of an ill, imperfect god, that yearning for spirituality, those broken characters that made Dick into such an interesting read.

Frank Miller’s and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled can be seen as an extended version of the Electric Ant story, only with the focus removed from the solipsistic and placed on the corporeal. Darrow’s detailed art which observes bodies in motion and in explicit degradation makes sure of that.