The Rabbit loved superheroes as a kid but seldom identified with them. It took growing up to do that. I was well into my 20s before I realized that every mild-mannered male had a secret identity, if not a colorful leotard with or without the requisite “S.”

I was somewhere in between youth and manhood, at least psychologically, when Marvel introduced Omega: The Unknown in 1976. There was plenty to identify with if I’d only been paying attention. Not that I could have imagined myself as the grim, buff-and-caped hero of the series or the adolescent, curly-haired James Michael, whose parents looked like Clark Kent and Lana Lang even if they were robots. But the identity confusion James Michael felt and his alienation; that would have been immediately recognizable and no more unusual than it was for a skinny, middle-class Midwestern kid to identify with a New York prep school brat named Holden.

Writers Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and illustrator Farel Dalrymple’s new Omega is less pumped and super. Their James Michael, here named Titus Alexander, is a skinnier, less curly-haired and handsome kid. But the shared story—battling battalions of alien robots while figuring out their own identities—is, if you can believe it, more believable in Lethem and Dalrymple’s hands. Alexander’s parents are tired and worn, even if they are robots. The women who become his guardian angels are fatigued and hardly bodacious. Super villains don’t just fall out of the sky as they do in the Marvel series which ran through ten issues of Omega The Unknown and two issues of Defenders before vanishing (still available in the Marvel collection Omega: The Unknown Classic). The main antagonist, other than alien robots, is a scene-stealing, self-promoter in a fuchsia body suit who monopolizes the local superhero franchise with an army of surrogates and a panel truck. His fearsome name: Mink.

Yes, Lethem plays for laughs as well as parody. He’s a genius at injecting elements of fantasy even though there’s not as much contrasting reality as there was in Fortress of Solitude. He’s extracted the best facets of the original Omega and done away with some that drowned its fantasy in commercialism. It’s an improvement on the original and, at the same time, something entirely different.

In his notes at the end of the remake, Lethem calls Steve Gerber and Mark Skrenes’ original Omega “simply the greatest single comic book I’d ever read.” But after its promising first issue, Omega reverted to serial Marvel form, dropping in appearances from Electro and, yes, The Incredible Hulk as well as a cameo from Spider Man. Lethem sticks with Mink and the robots while keeping all of the original’s clever devices: James-Michael/Alexander’s sympathetic pain for the shadowy Omega, their shared, palm-sized super power, Omega’s struggles to deal with life on Earth, and Alexander’s own struggle to survive in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

One of the standout sections in both the original and the remake concerns Alex’s bullied fellow student. The statement here is that street life can be as terrifying as an invasion of alien robots. Dalrymple’s drawings, as stereotyped as the originals were exaggerated, spare us the visual consequences of intimidation that the original does not. Despite the stereotypes, the illustrations lend a further element of believability to the story, even at its most surreal turns. The dully lit, often dark backdrops from colorist Paul Hornschemeier, and the grayness in the deteriorating Omega’s face, make for a sort of visual foreshadowing. There’s a standout panel early into the tale of our young hero and his roommate in front of the New York Public Library that suggests a little knowledge is like entering a shadow. Dalrymple’s most manic scene is the full-page that opens section VI. There’s a palpable madness in the single eye, seen through a desk magnifier, of a robotics student as he works on an alien appendage. Section VII, drawn by the acclaimed Gary Panter, is a child’s nightmare of the devolving situation, primitively horrific in black, beige and blood red.

The original Omega is known for its overly ambitious caption narration, words that dealt with the metaphorical elements of the story in grandiose language (sample: “THE ENERGY—THE CREATIVE FORCE—COULD BE DISCIPLINED ONLY SO STRICTLY, HELD SEETHING IN CHECK ONLY SO LONG, BEFORE IT BURST FORTH—“). In staying true to this form, Lethem brings the story a new sense of literacy (“NIHILISM MAY BE THE SOLE BRAND OF SELF-ASSERTION THAT CAN’T BE PACKAGED AND SOLD BACK TO ITS ORIGINAL OWNER”) as well as finding an excuse to have some fun (“KILL OR BE KILLED, EAT OR BE EATEN, ENGULF AND DEVOUR… DON’T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD”).

There are details galore to put together as one tries to make sense of the plot, not all of them welcomed by this long-eared reader. Robotic insects, tap-dancing street people and a giant, severed hand keep things complicated. A fictional fast food conglomerate plays an important role and Omega is taken in by a kindly old man who serves hot dogs and Italian ice from a street wagon. A pensive, over-sized bust in a park watches over all. Some of the comic turns here threaten to derail the story. Others are just part of some symbolic shtick. At one point, the starving Omega climbs a tree and grabs a bald eagle for his dinner.

Still we expect comics to be comic, even if they are about revenge and interplanetary destruction. Lethem and Rusnak have succeeded in taking the myth of a boy come to Earth to save a second planet (shades of Superman and Terminator!) from out-of-control robotics (Blade Runner!) and making it smart, intriguing and worthy of illustration. The last several brilliant pages share something important with the original: no chance of a sequel. Then again, in comics…..—Cabbage Rabbit

The problem with fiction set in the future is that the present is always catches up. Take for example A Scanner Darkly, the best known of the five novels in the Library of America’s latest collection from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Written in the early 1970s and set in 1994, it now, almost 15 years later, seems dated (Dick died in 1982). Drug dealers still use pay phones, cars still have carburetors and people still listen to cassette tapes. On the other hand, police use holograms for spying on suspected dealers and undercover cops wear something called a “scramble suit” that makes them not quite visible. How come the forces of oppression always get the cool technology?

In many ways, Dick’s bypassed future looks like the present. A Scanner Darkly, like the 2006 digitally-colored movie staring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder it inspired, is famously set in an Orange County we recognize. Commercial strips are populated with MacDonald’s and Pizza Huts, houses are made of plastic and there must have been a mortgage crisis because whole tract of them have been abandoned. The world of 1994 is a place in which the ‘70s really never went away. People “flash” on thoughts, quality drugs are “primo” and those who like to get “loaded” are “heads.” Stoners still go to the drive-in to see Planet of the Apes and all ten (ten?) sequels.

A burn-out tragedy focused on the paranoia of surveillance society, A Scanner Darkly speaks to the present. It’s a strange read, stranger than the strangely animated movie it inspires. That’s the thing about Dick’s writing. In plot, pace and ideas, it twists your thinking. It carries timeless messages. Dick’s great themes of high anxiety, insidious technology and mental exploitation take over your head like his imaginary drugs. You don’t know what to believe even after you’ve put the book down. In a sense, reading Dick is the ultimate natural high.

Five Novels of the 1960s &; 70s follows the structure of the Library’s first volume, Four Novels of the 1960s. There’s a story made famous by Hollywood (in the first volume it was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which became the movie Blade Runner). There’s a stunning work of contemporarily relevance and surreal dread like the psychedelic marketing nightmare Ubik from the previous volume. This time it’s Now Wait for Last Year, which focuses on a three-way interplanetary war and a drug that facilitates time travel. To further screw your neurons, there’s a psychotically personal tale, in this case Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Dick infrequently wrote stories that create realities we’ve were lucky to avoid. Here, it’s Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along after the Bomb, an account of life after a nuclear test disaster and the resulting exchange of bombs. The world somehow survives—this is actually a story about devotion–but don’t leave your horse unattended or somebody’s liable to eat it.

Dick’s fixation with interplanetary colonization is represented by Martian Time Slip. Life on Mars is dismal and aimless. Colonists wile away the hours until the ditch rider visits with the monthly supply of water. A traveling salesman swings by to break the monotony (and we do mean swings). Corporations scheme over which will get to exploit Mars’ not-so-abundant minerals and the colonists bide their time with the latest mind-relaxing drugs. The strangest touch: autistic children are exploited by business because they can see into the future and predict how well a product will sell.

Paranoia was the great theme of the last collection and it’s certainly present here, especially in A Scanner Darkly. But other psychological states figure in, notably schizophrenia. Dick was a heavy abuser of amphetamines and as he progressed into the ‘70s, questions of sanity dominated his work. The drug known as “Death” or simply “D” in A Scanner Darkly puts the brain at war with itself, dividing right and left spheres in a competition that results in dual realities.

This is what sets Dick’s stories apart from most other science fiction. He wasn’t so interested in inventing futuristic technology as he was in how we would keep from loosing our minds in enslavement to it. The setting may be Mars but the existential problems are the same.

The question of whether or not Dick was merely an exceptional pulp writer persists. As in the previous volume, some of these novels are just decent, others works of genius. But the scenarios and mental states he explores, even in the lesser stories, tend to linger long after this hefty volume’s been closed. Both hemispheres of our brain agree: that’s the sign of great literature.–Cabbage Rabbit

We have seen the future, thanks to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and it looks like the present… even when it’s set in the past. No, we don’t fly around it rocket-powered hovercraft, there are no colonies on the moon let alone Mars and we don’t carry around laser tubes for zapping our enemies like they do in Dick’s novels. But the pervasive and shady marketing, corporate warfare, bum but expensive technology, reality-altering drugs, and the pervading sense that somehow all of this can’t be real, well, seems so contemporary. And there’s something else familiar about Dick’s fiction: persistent paranoia and self-doubt.

Never mind that much of Dick’s future is now 15 years in the past. Most of the action in the recent The Library of America collection Four Novels of the 1960s is set in the 1990s. That much of the technology he imagined didn’t materialize in the roughly 25 years since the original publications doesn’t matter. Dick correctly foresaw much of the questionable materialism, the nonchalant pursuit of pleasure and the corporate dominance we see today as well as our enslavement to the technology. To borrow one of his own terms, Dick was decidedly “precog.”

But precognition wasn’t Dick’s greatest talent. What he grasped was the present. Dick understood the drug taking, the advertising and the pay-to play mind set that evolved in the 1960s–not to mention the feeling that someone was always watching–and extrapolated the future from there. In some of these tales, it costs a nickel just to open a door, even if it’s your own. Who gets the nickel? Does the door report activity to the government, or worse, the corporate oligarchy?

Dick was a much honored writer among sci-fi buffs in 1982, the year of his death. That was also the year Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and it ignited general interest in his work. Forget that Scott’s film took place in a rainy Los Angeles rather than Dick’s dusty San Francisco, that the replicants in the book, unlike the movie, were easily dispatched or that the blade runner himself, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, was married, adding another layer of ethical quandary to his existential problems (Harrison Ford, with a fetish for a certain replicant, played the role single in the movie). Those of us who, once we left our teenage years, gave up on science fiction recognized Dick as a writer who’d made hack a craft (close exceptions in some of his early work from the 1950s). He turned pulp genre into ethically complex, tryingly plotted, multi-layered works of genius. The movie, though brilliant, didn’t come close to the thoughtfulness of Dick’s book.

The four stories here are more William Burroughs than H.G. Wells. They reflect the author’s slow descent into paranoia and hallucinatory mind set that continued until his death. The Man In the High Castle reverses the outcome of World War II with the Germans and Japanese, in an uneasy alliance, splitting the coasts and struggling for control in the center. An illegal work of fiction has captured attention in the former United States. The book is a Dick-like novel that imagines what would have happened if America had won the war.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch follows turf battles on the colonized planets between rival corporate drug suppliers. Hallucinations overlap reality and sinister CEO types literally become gods. Life is cheap in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and not easily identifiable. Parallel realities exist in adjacent buildings and a real live animal, like a spider, is worth a fortune. Time reverses in Ubik, threatening the profit of an all-purpose product (and we mean all purposes) even as precogs gather the mental power to save the future.

What’s fantastic here is not the technology, which is developed not to benefit mankind but to fleece it, but the evolution of a world where nothing can be trusted. Inanimate objects control even the smallest acts. If you don’t have a nickel to open that door, the door speaks insults even as you beg it for credit. Science has found a way to contact the dead but it’s going to cost you plenty and, like cell-phone reception among the mountains, the signal isn’t guaranteed. Corporations employ precogs to predict the success of their products and spy on their competitors. You may think you’ve recovered from a drug-induced hallucination but have really only entered another.

The volume is edited by Jonathan Lethem, whose Fortress Of Solitude carries something of Dick’s absurdist sense of fantasy as well as some of his humor. There’s no forward but Lethem’s chronology of Dick’s life will set fans wondering if the author’s later work was even more twisted and paranoid than these four tales. Reality, as Dick knew, isn’t always what it seems.—Cabbage Rabbit

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick; The Library of America, hardback, 830 pages, $35.

A version of this story first appeared in the Inland Empire Weekly