On September 25, Surrogates will be playing in theaters. The film is based on the 2005-2006 comic The Surrogates, which is about a future in which people live everyday life vicariously through mechanical, remote-controlled, human-like machines. It was written by first-time comic author Robert Venditti and illustrated by Brett Weldele. Sci-Fi Block editor in chief Robert Ring got the chance to interview Venditti about his comic, his influence, and his upcoming work.

SFB: Hi, Robert. How are you doing today?

Robert Venditti: Pretty good. How’s it going, Robert? Good name!

SFB: [laughs] That’s right! I agree. So, things are going pretty well for you lately. The Surrogates is your first published comic and already you’ve got a movie deal. How’s life changed for you?

Robert Venditti: You know, in a lot of ways it’s pretty similar to what it was before, and I’m just like anyone else trying to get a career off the ground, you know? The Surrogates was my first book, and obviously it sold pretty well, and with the movie coming out and all those kinds of things it’s helped put the name out there, but, you know, I’m just like anyone else trying to get more work and trying to get in with the big companies and earn a living at this. So, I guess a lot of people would think that if you sell a book for a movie, your life is made and you ride off into the sunset rich beyond your wildest dreams, but that’s not really the way it works. I’m just looking at this as an opportunity to get a career off the ground and get some more work for myself.

SFB: So, you’re not to the level of bathing in Cristal on the weekends yet, but you’re getting there, right?

Robert Venditti: Yeah, well, I dunno. A fella can dream.

SFB:[laughs] Given that The Surrogates is your first comic, was this story something you had brewing in your mind for a long time and were finally able to let out, or did it kind of come out more spontaneously when you sat down and began writing?

Robert Venditti: It was an idea that just struck me, and I started taking notes on that idea pretty much immediately -- you know, I don’t remember exactly, but that day or maybe the next day. And the entire story was written and scripted out within seven or eight months from when the idea initially struck me. So, the underlying themes, or ideas, had been kicking around in my head for a while, but they didn’t sort of explode together and create the story idea until the moment that I started writing.

SFB: You've cited Watchmen and Astro City as your two points of reference for learning how to write a good comic, even though you had studied creative writing in college. Can you tell us what elements you took from those two comics?

Robert Venditti: I don't know that they're my only two points of reference. I certainly studied a lot of other things, and I guess that I would say that, learning to write comics, a lot of the stuff that I took over into the way that I want to tell stories in comics, I got from my background in prose writing and just sort of general knowledge about telling a story in general no matter what the format is, as far as developing character and plot. So, I would say that's where most of it came from. But I guess what jumped out at me after reading Astro City and Watchmen, which I read, I guess, quite a while apart from each other, was just their complexity in plot, complexity of characters, and all those things that I had sort of learned about during my education in more quote-unquote "literary" style of writing, which is sort of what they refer to it [as] in the college system sometimes -- you know, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all these kinds of things are described as "literary" fiction. So, Watchmen and Astro City had that same depth of character and subtext that literary fiction has, and that's definitely something that I wanted to bring to my own stories and hopefully will be able to do throughout my career.

SFB: Do you see The Surrogates as a prophetic or a hypothetical work? Is this a situation that you believe we will face someday in some way, or is it just kind of a situation you’ve set up for us to use to examine life in general?

Robert Venditti: I guess it’s a little bit of both. When I wrote it, it was purely hypothetical. You know, part of me was wondering whether readers would buy in to this concept or think it was ridiculous, this future where people were living through remote-controlled representations of themselves, but that was in 2002, and since then, technology has come so far that I think that it may actually become a reality at some point. Not necessarily that all society would be operating in the way that the world is in The Surrogates, but certainly that we would have technology where you can control machines by thought and experience life through them.

Wired magazine posted a documentary featurette correlated with the movie a few weeks back where they actually went and interviewed a bunch of roboticists and other scientists and talked to them about how close technology is right now to actually being able to bring the technology of The Surrogates about. So, you know, it started out hypothetical, but maybe it will actually become more than that.

SFB: Your comic highlights the ups and downs of a world in which practically everyone lives vicariously via Surrogates – as you said, mechanical representations of themselves. Do you personally have a stance on this matter, whether it would overall be a good or bad thing?

Robert Venditti: I don’t. You know, one of the things I wanted to do with the comic and just with my writing in general is that I don’t ever want to answer questions for the audience. I don’t ever want to make it plain what my views are as the writer because, to me, that’s where you get into a situation where the audience feels like they’re being preached to. What I wanna do is just raise the questions and let the audience answer them for themselves. And so that’s why I tried very hard in the book to show you both sides of the technology – people using it for good and people using it in ways that you might think are excessive or abusive. So, I tried to present both sides of the story and then just leave it up to readers to answer that for themselves. I don’t really have that answer myself.

SFB: There is an important event discussed in the first Surrogates graphic novel and fully depicted in the prequel, Flesh and Bone, involving teenagers getting reckless with their parents’ Surrogates and killing a real human. One somewhat similar problem with teens on the internet these days is cyberbullying. Obviously there are some big differences here, but do you think this event in your book was born out of that contemporary issue or is somehow analogous?

Robert Venditti: Yeah, again, you know, the genesis for that idea was written back in, I guess, 2002 or around that time, certainly the idea for it, of these kids joyriding in their parents’ Surrogates, and they end up beating a homeless man to death. I don’t know if cyberbullying was a problem back then, honestly. It may have been; I just don’t recall. So, it’s just another one of those things where I think I came up with the idea and the world just sort of caught up to that to some extent, at least as far as my own knowledge goes. I didn’t have any knowledge of Second Life or cyberbullying or those kinds of things at that point. I mean, there were certainly plenty of people, obviously, pretending to be what they weren’t online, but I remember hearing about cyberbullying very recently, where you had parents going in and pretending to be other students in high schools and sort of tormenting the other kids and stuff like that, so that wasn’t really something that was playing into my mind. It was just sort of this idea [of] "What do kids always try to do when they get to be about that age when they’re young teenagers?" -- if they wanna go out and sort of live like adults and pretend that they are adults and sneak into rated-R movies or see if they can buy cigarettes or whatever. So, joyriding in a parent’s Surrogate that would allow you to do all those kinds of things seemed like something that kids would just do.

SFB: Yeah, it seems sort of just like a natural way to go, really, when you think about it. With these new technologies, they just present all sorts of new, inherent dangers, and in real life we have the internet, in your comic we have the Surrogates, and they both kind of lend themselves to dangerous situations in their own ways.

Robert Venditti: Sure, and I think that’s – not even “I think” – that is really the huge underpinning of the Surrogates series as a whole -- the two books that are out now and the future books I still would like to do -- is this effect that technology has on future generations. We’re so quick to adopt technology into our daily lives that we don’t often consider what the ramifications of it are going to be, and technology being what it is and growing at an exponential rate and just barreling forward all the time, as soon as something’s on the market we’ve already almost moved beyond that, so we never really stop to consider Where are we right now? We’re always looking at and concentrating on where we’re trying to get to, and I think that we sort of adopt a technology into our lives, and that’s our choice, but our children will be born into that whether they want that or not. So, in essence we’re making decisions about the future that other people are going to live with that have no say in that, and so that’s kind of the driving theme behind all of the Surrogates books.

SFB: Any thoughts on what you'd like to do in a future Surrogates run?

Robert Venditti: Yeah, there are additional books I would like to do. I've always sort of envisioned it as a trilogy. I've since come up with ideas for two more books that would be in there as well, so it would now be five books total, and I already have it all mapped out in my head, and I have had it mapped out in my head for quite some time. I know what those plots are gonna be and what's gonna happen to these characters and the kind of things that I'd like to address, but it's not anything that I really wanna start talking about this early in the game. I like to sort of hold my cards closer until the books are more into production and we start doing PR and those kinds of things, and start putting out details when that stuff happens.

SFB: The Surrogates takes place in the 2050s, and the prequel in 2039. Do you think this kind of technology would be possible then, or are you just picking a date far enough in the future that it’s believable?

Robert Venditti: Based on what that Wired feature was saying, I would say it’s gonna happen sooner. I mean, they’re already to a point now where you can control machines by thought, and there’s a company in [the article] called Anybots, and they create robots that can be in different parts of the world, and you link to them from a remote location, and you sort of drive them around and steer them and everything through thought, and you can hear and see everything that they are hearing and seeing, and talk through them, so, I mean, we’ve already got the remote-control thing nailed down, and we’ve got two of the five senses. So, it seems to me like it’s probably gonna happen sooner than the dates that I posited in the books.

SFB: That’s kinda scary, right?

Robert Venditti: It is a little scary, yeah! [laughs]

SFB: As far as location goes, the story takes place in what is called the Central Georgia Metropolis. You happen to live in Atlanta, Georgia, which you might say is central Georgia’s metropolis. Is there something about Atlanta that you feel lends itself to this kind of story?

Robert Venditti: Well, yeah. I mean, I like Atlanta. You know, I wasn’t born here – I was born in Florida – but I’ve been in Atlanta for about ten years now, and I really enjoy it as a city. And I wanted to do something first of all that was different. I mean, every story’s in either New York or L.A., right? So, nothing’s ever in the South unless it’s something like Steel Magnolias, you know? So, I wanted to do something that was set in the South. But also, Atlanta, culturally, has a very complex make-up. It’s a very diverse population that lends itself a lot to the themes of race and identity that I also try to introduce in the books, so that was a good reason to set it here.

SFB: Speaking of L.A. and New York, you’ve specifically, obviously, chosen not to move to one of those ends of the country where it seems practically everyone involved in the pop culture industry lives. Do you feel it helps you as a writer to be away from all the hubbub of a place like L.A. or New York?

Robert Venditti: I don’t know, I’ve never thought about that. My reasons for not moving to either one of those two cities has nothing to do with, you know, my process and what I think is good for me as a writer. Where I live now, there’s lots of trees, and I’m almost sort of in the foothills of the Appalachians, and there’s wide open spaces and these kinds of things, and you go to New York City and the buildings are just sort of closing down on you. So, my reasons for being here in the South are because I like being in the South, and I identify with this way of life down here, more so than any other reason for not going to L.A. or New York.

SFB: Your writing career is pretty young. In the future do you think you'd be interested in branching out into other mediums like cinema, TV, or even novels, or do you see yourself as a comic writer?

Robert Venditti: I think I would definitely like to do other things. Like I said, my original goal was to be a prose writer, and I have some novel ideas and some short story ideas. I'm actually working on a short story right now. So, prose is something I definitely want to come back to, and I've thought about doing screenwriting as well. I've started looking into that and sort of learning the mechanics of that, but for right now I'm just trying to get one career off the ground, and I want to try to do that as solidly as I can before I start maybe branching out into other things, but any kind of storytelling is something that appeals to me, and I'd like to try various different approaches.

SFB: Your next graphic novel is called The Homeland Directive and is coming out in 2010. Is there anything you can tell us about it?

Robert Venditti: Yeah. I’m not going to go into too much detail about it yet because we haven’t really started talking about it yet, and I’m not sure how to talk about it, but basically it’s a political-medical thriller set in the modern day, so it’s not sci-fi. And what I’m trying to do in that book is raise the question: In the world that we live in today, is it possible for personal privacy and public safety to co-exist? You know, when the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all these documents, were written – which they’re always touted as what their intents were – the worst thing you had to worry about back in those days was maybe a cannonball coming through your living room window, you know? The world’s much more complex now, and so [the book]’s just sort of about how do we reconcile our desire for privacy and our desire for safety, and are they reconcilable? Because, we sort of demand both, and we want both sides of the equation. And I’m not different than any other. You know, I want my privacy and my safety at the same time, so how do you deal with that in a world as scary as the world that we live in today? So, that’s what the book is about.

SFB: Well, it sounds interesting. Robert, thanks again for your time, and good luck with the movie.

Robert Venditti: No problem, man. Thanks for talking to me, Robert.