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I, Robot

The Surrogates Robert Venditti, Brett Weldele Top Shelf, 2006 Rating: 3.7

Posted: January 31, 2007

By Kevin Forest Moreau

Robert Venditti powers his first graphic novel, The Surrogates -- originally collected in comics form -- with a brilliant premise: Five decades from now, human (or at least American) life has been completely transformed by the invention of "surrogates" -- android bodies that their owners send out into the real world to do their jobs and interact with others while they remain safe at home. It's an utterly fascinating concept, and in text pieces that supplement each chapter, Watchmen-style, he delves deep into all of its social, political, criminal and socioeconomic implications.

The story itself is a standard police procedural, which follows Detective Harvey Greer as he investigates a mysterious figure who's been electrifying surrogates and stealing technology. Harvey -- is there a name that more aptly sums up your average-Joe schlub? -- quickly intuits that his enigmatic subject has an anti-surrogate agenda, and races to stay only one step behind his opponent, even as he comes to long for the simpler days of human-on-human contact.

This doesn't sit well with people like Harvey's wife, who's addicted to her surrogate, and it's to Venditti's credit that he doesn't overplay this conflict. (One of the extras of this collected edition, the script for a deleted scene in which a dejected Harvey is jeered at by prostitutes for asking for actual physicality, proves that the writer was wise to follow his instincts and not steer The Surrogates into areas that strain credibility.)

Since this is set some 52 years after the book's publication date, Venditti seems obligated to give his setting a futuristic feel, although changing what is presumably the metro Atlanta area to the "Central Georgia Metropolis" simply feels forced. (It's also odd that not much else about American life in 2054 appears all that different from life in 2006; car designs might have changed a bit, but if fashions have evolved at all, it's difficult to tell.) Likewise, the inclusion of a "reservation" for anti-technology cultists, led by a dreadlocked "prophet," subtracts from the sci-fi realism Venditti and artist Brett Weldele are so careful to cultivate elsewhere, and adds an unwelcome late-night B-movie air to an otherwise plausibly constructed reality.

But none of that detracts from The Surrogates or seriously wrenches the reader out of the story. If any element threatens to do that, it's Weldele's scratchy, Bill Sienkiewicz-inspired linework and murky color palette. Both are obviously intended to keep things grounded in a future-noir sensibility, and to suggest a rough, animal human-ness to contrast the book's theme of detachment, and toward that end this approach is successful. Ultimately, though, it sacrifices a clarity of form and concept, and robs some of the dramatic moments (especially in the final chapter) of their impact.

All that said, The Surrogates is an intriguing and easily absorbing read, one that provokes some real thought about where our increasingly virtual, insular world of cell phones and Internet interaction is headed. It's science fiction in the truest sense of the term, and if it relies a little too readily on some of the tropes of the genre, it nonetheless makes lovers of thoughtful comics eager to see what other worlds Venditti is capable of conjuring.

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