Broken Frontier

Robert Venditti is living the comic book fan’s dream, and yet he didn’t even start off as a comic book fan. He’s gone from reading his first comic, to having a major motion picture based on his debut work, in a span of less than 10 years. That film is Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, and it comes out tomorrow. Broken Frontier spoke with Robert about Surrogates and how it all came together for him.

BROKEN FRONTIER: To start off, tell us a bit about your background in comics.

ROBERT VENDITTI: Well, I got my start in comics in 2002 when I volunteered to work in the mailroom over at Top Shelf. That was really my beginning of being in the industry. I didn’t grow up reading comics, and so I didn’t read my first comic really until around 2000, and it was at that point that I decided I wanted to try to write them.

BF: What was your first comic?

RV: Astro City.

BF: How did you wind up picking that up?

RV: Through a buddy of mine I worked with at Borders down in Florida. I was in grad school at the time for prose writing, getting my masters in creative writing, and a buddy of mine that I worked with was always trying to get me to read comics, but I never did. I had the same preconceptions, erroneous preconceptions, that most people did back then (it’s certainly not as bad today) - that it was a juvenile medium, and it was just kids and all that. And he was always trying to get me to read stuff, and I never would. But finally he told me about the Confession story arc in Astro City and it sounded interesting. So I picked it up and I read it.

BF: So it really made an impact on you?

RV: It did, because in writing classes they always try to tell us to write stories that are grounded in good characters, strong characters, and things like that, and when I read Astro City, it just sort of jumped out at me. The story had these strong characters, and it was very subtextual, very thematic in the way that quote, unquote "literary fiction" would be. And that was all the stuff that I wanted to do as a writer, but it also had this very strong visual element that comics have, that also appealed to me.

BF: That’s very cool. So do you know if Kurt Busiek has ever read The Surrogates?

RV: I have no idea! I did meet Kurt (he’d never remember this). I met him very, very briefly, once at a convention and told him that his book was the reason why I got into comics, but I doubt he would remember that. It was before The Surrogates was even published.

BF: So you went to work at Top Shelf. What were you doing there?

RV: Working in their mailroom, packing boxes for them.

BF: And how did that transition into working on The Surrogates?

RV: Well, Top Shelf was a pretty small operation at the time, I was the first employee they’d ever had. So even though I started out packing boxes in a warehouse it quickly developed into a job that encompassed other things because, with so few people working at the company, everybody sort of had to be a jack of all trades.

So I was branching out, doing other things, and Chris Staros had known from my discussions with him that I had wanted to be a writer, and we would drive to conventions, and talk about ideas, and whatnot. And I had already been writing The Surrogates when I drove to a convention with him, in July of 2002, when I told him about the idea, and he was very intrigued by it. I could tell that he liked the idea just by the way that he was asking me questions about it - you know, "what is this" and "what is that". He was really getting excited about it. So as I was writing the script, I would turn it over to him, and he would read through it, and he was always very supportive. But he didn’t say he was going to publish it until the thing was entirely written and he saw that I was able to bring the whole thing over the transom.

At that point he decided to publish it. Up till that point, I was just having him look it over, as a way of tightening it up where it needed to be tightened up, and hopefully he would introduce me to other editors, and help me submit it around.

BF: Before coming to Top Shelf, were you really into what they were publishing? Is that how you got hooked up with them?

RV: I had no idea what their line was all about. In 2002, I was very ignorant of what there was out there in comics. I just ended up working for them because I live in Atlanta and that’s where they are. I was trying to get into the industry and trying to find any way to do it, and they were a publisher that was close by.

BF: I think I read that you’d come to work for them kind of at a crisis point for them, when their distributor had gone out of business?

RV: Yeah, it was their book trade distributor at the time, and Top Shelf had printed a bunch of books that the distributor had sold, and then went bankrupt before they paid Top Shelf for them. So they had all the printing bills but none of the income.

BF: I was on the Warren Ellis Forum at the time, and I remember a call went out to everybody, "Just buy their books", and I guess it saved the company.

RV: Exactly. And I got that same email, and I called Chris up, told him I was a local guy, and asked him if there’s anything I could do to sort of help him out. He said, "I could really use someone to pack boxes" and I said "Yeah, no problem, I can do that." It was very much like you said, the company really was kind of saved overnight. So that was when I got my start with them.

BF: So was The Surrogates a big departure from what they had done up till that point?

RV: Very much so. It was the first full-color, sort of mainstream-style comic book miniseries that they had ever done. Their stock-in-trade was black-and-white, more sort of literary-style of comics, and graphic novels, not even serialized stuff.

BF: What made them decide to do this in serial form?

RV: Unbeknownst to me, they had always wanted to do a serialized comic, and sort of doing something fun and sort of mainstream like that. I didn’t know that at the time, but they were always looking to do something like that as a fun project. I think just the fact that I was an in-house guy, and they knew me really well, also certainly helped them making the decision to do this. So I think that was part of it.

BF: Now, what was it that gave you the original idea for The Surrogates?

RV: When I was in grad school I took a class called "Literature of the Internet". We studied texts like Neuromancer, and Snow Crash, but also non-fiction stuff; essays and books. One of the books we read was a non-fiction book called Cybergypsies where the writer had spent a lot of time with people addicted to the Internet; either to gaming, or chatrooms, or whatever. Again, this was late ‘90s when he wrote the book, so things weren’t as progressed as they are now in that way, but the world was sort of heading that way.

So I read this book, and these guys and girls in the book would create these personas for themselves online, and they would become so involved in them that they would lose their jobs, or get divorced, or any of these kinds of things, because they were spending so much time in front of the machine maintaining the personas they created.

So it was just sort of an idea that stuck with me, this sort of basic human need that people seem to have to be something other than who they are, and that just kind of kicked around in my head for a few years. Couple that with a rise in plastic surgery procedures purely for cosmetic reasons, and a lot of TV shows that were giving people makeovers and all that kind of stuff, and those two things kind of came together for me. What if there was a world where we could tailor the way we look and we could look however we wanted, and instead of it being bound to the machine, you could send that identity out into the world, and it could go to the grocery store and take the kids to school, and do all the things you need to do to get through living, and you could be that persona all the time; what would the future be like if everybody was living that way?

Because in a lot of ways that’s what the Internet does, it sort of redefines our identity as far as race and gender and age and all those kinds of things because you don’t know, when you’re in the machine talking with somebody or whatever. It’s not like you’re seeing them, you only know who they are based on the information they provide you. So you can reinvent yourself that way, and so I just came up with this idea for technology that would allow people to reinvent themselves in that way but also go out into the world and live their lives, and that’s sort of where everything came from.

BF: Is that where we’re headed?

RV: At the time that I wrote it, part of me was wondering if people were going to think this idea was too far-fetched, like, who would ever want to do this? That was 2002, and just in the time that’s passed between now and then, you’ve had a lot of things like Second Life, and gaming is even more popular now than it was then. I don’t know, it seems like it’s certainly plausible.

There was a documentary that Disney did, or Touchstone did, in conjunction with the film and also with Wired magazine where they sort of went and spent all this time with real life roboticists who looked at the technology that we have today, and asked them how close or how far away we are from bringing about an actual world of The Surrogates. It’s actually pretty weird how close things are getting. Machine are already being controlled by thought. So it’s certainly possible that the world could end up going that way.

BF: Can you personally see the appeal of that kind of an existence?

RV: I don’t know. I’d like to think that if surrogates were a real technology, that I wouldn’t use them, but…

BF: Maybe you’d say "Oh, I’ll just try it out once…"

RV: Yeah, I mean technology’s such a seductive thing, we all get caught up in it, that’s just sort of the nature of it. So as much as I want to say that I wouldn’t do it, I’m sure that I probably would; if all of the world was doing it, why wouldn’t I do it? And in some ways you get forced into it. Just as an example, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was talk about different aspects of these scenarios where you have technology moving into life, and what if the world really was all surrogates, and I was saying "No, I don’t want to have a surrogate" but what would that do to me if I wanted to get a job?

Depending on what your job is, you might not be able to get employed unless you had a surrogate because of insurance reasons, because it would be cheaper to insure Rob’s surrogate which is just a piece of equipment than Rob’s actual life. So in some ways I think you have to become involved in technology like that whether you want to or not.

To be continued…