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.