The Surrogates (Surrogates (Graphic Novels)) [Paperback]

Robert Venditti (Author), Brett Weldele (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2006

The year is 2054, and life has been reduced to a data feed. The fusing of virtual reality and cybernetics has ushered in the era of the surrogate, a new technology that lets users interact with the world without ever leaving their homes. It's a perfect world, and it's up to Detectives Harvey Greer and Pete Ford of the Metro Police Department to keep it that way. But to do so they'll need to stop a techno-terrorist bent on returning society to a time when people lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them. Welcome to The Surrogates, a daring, five-issue, full-color miniseries coming this July from Top Shelf Productions.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The year is 2054, and the Central Georgia Metropolis is held in a grip of fear by a series of crimes committed by the mysterious lightning-wielding techno-terrorist dubbed Steeplejack. His attacks stem from an agenda that seeks to disconnect humanity from its dependence on "surrogates," androids that the consumer can link with and allow to carry out the user's life, acting as a full-time stand-in. For investigating detective Harvey Greer, Steeplejack's anti-surrogate rampage unearths possible connections to a fanatical prophet. Years earlier, this prophet incited riots while preaching a gospel of returning society to a time when people actually lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them, a point of view that Greer is slowly coming to agree with. Basically a straight police procedural laced with science-fiction trappings, Venditti's script offers a convincing future in which mankind doesn't realize that the virtual reality of the surrogates is potentially worse than any narcotic. This quietly bleak scenario is capably illustrated by Weldele in a straightforward style reminiscent of film storyboards. As a change of pace from typical superheroic fare, this volume comes heartily recommended. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In 2054, everybody in the Central Georgia Metropolis who can afford one owns a surrogate to go out and do things while its owner transmits all the decisions and receives all the effects safely at home. But someone or something is frying surrogates with megavolt electrical charges, and police lieutenant Harvey Greer has to find out who or what. The prime suspect is the Prophet, the quasi-Rastafarian leader of a cult that rioted against the surrogates 15 years ago. It soon seems, however, that the actual, physical perp is a supersurrogate, and the Prophet wouldn't ever use any kind of surrogate. Venditti fills this police-procedural sf scenario with tech-savvy-sounding dialogue and serious satire of humanity's love of gadgets, ingeniously supplying backstory via documents (academic paper, TV transcript, etc.), not flashbacks or exposition. Weldele gives the tale exceptional gravitas by drawing figures and settings more or less sketchily and memorably conveying emotional effect by tinting each scene or sequence in its own peculiar set of hues of just one or two colors. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Top Shelf Productions (September 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891830872
• ISBN-13: 978-1891830877
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 6.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #287,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Southern Comic, January 18, 2008

By 

John Ottinger III "Book Reviewer" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Surrogates (Surrogates (Graphic Novels)) (Paperback)

"Life...Only Better," says the slogan of VSI, maker of surrogates. And who wouldn't want to improve their life, to make it better, or to make it what they had always dreamed it should be? Such is the basis for the science fiction graphic novel The Surrogates. Written by Robert Venditti, with art direction by Brett Weldele, this novel brings a unique take on the established rules of science fiction.

The future world created by Venditti has a great deal of potential. In creating the concept of the surrogate, Venditti has shown that even when race and gender are no longer factors in decisions, our innate prejudices still rise to the top. Additionally, remove race and gender as social factors, and you are left with religion. While the religion in The Surrogates is extreme and cultic Christianity, it could just has easily have been any other religion's fanatics. For the location and time frame of the story, Christianity makes the most sense.

I also found it daring to set the story in Georgia rather than the traditional big cities of New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Those cities have been used often, their unique cultures explored through science fiction. Science fiction has failed to tap into the strange and unique culture that is the Southern States. In doing so, The Surrogates has broken new ground. The story has found ample material for evaluating existing culture, and challenging our preconceptions.

The Surrogates is a fine graphic novel, and I hope that Venditti continues to write in this world. I recommend this book to all science fiction fans, cultural theorists, and comic book fans. The artwork is provocative, the story compelling, and the setting unique.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Marching Through Georgia indeed., January 27, 2010

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Surrogates (Surrogates (Graphic Novels)) (Paperback)

Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, The Surrogates (Top Shelf, 2006)

It is by now a Hollywood cliché, not to mention a Hollywood truism, that the book is better than the movie. And that is certainly the case where The Surrogates is concerned. That said, in some ironic way, reading Robert Venditti's original source material gave me a slightly greater respect for Jonathan Mostow's bloated, listless adaptation. I can see why he made the changes he made, and some of them I actually agree with. (The two big ones, as it turns out, were direct contributors to the movie's downfall, to the point where I may actually go back and revise my review to include a discussion of them.)

If you saw the movie trailers, you've got a basic idea, but I'll give you a rundown anyway: it's 2054, and the world is populated by human beings who live vicariously through androids known as surrogates. The human flops down in a chair, puts on a headset, and bam, virtual reality. Surrogates work for their owners (allowing the out-of-shape to be construction workers, say), drink and do drugs for their owners (all the sensation with none of the withdrawal symptoms), have illicit affairs for their owners, etc. You get the idea. 92% of the world's humans, we're told, own and use surrogates. The rest are not too happy with this. In the metro Atlanta area where the book takes place, the head of the non-surrogate-using humans, known as the Dreads, is The Prophet, a mover and shaker in the anti-surrogate riots of 2039 who eventually agreed with the mayor of Atlanta that he and his Luddite pals needed to move out of Atlanta to a reservation seventy miles away. All of what I'm giving you here is setup for the actual plot, which involves two surrogates who we see being fried in the opening scene, and the two detectives assigned to the case.

While no one would call The Surrogates a subtle book, in comparison to the movie it's like a velvet glove. The main reason for this is that the movie changes the book anti-consumer message to something far more muddled, yet far closer to the surface (in the movie, the deaths of the surrogates travels back over the wires to kill their owners, which changes the whole nature of the movie's plot). Venditti also has some strong words about addiction which are cut, rather brutally I might add, out by the changing of a few key scenes. They are the book's most powerful (especially Venditti's final panel), and the movie's weakest. That Mostow failed miserably in his attempt to bring The Surrogates to the screen, and that the changes made to it were exactly the wrong ones, does not make Hollywood any less respectable for at least trying to take a very good, if transparent, indie piece and being it to the masses. It gives me some small version of hope that someone in Hollywood still actually cares about art. *** ½

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent science fiction, February 10, 2009

By 

Digital Puer "digital_puer" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Surrogates (Surrogates (Graphic Novels)) (Paperback)

The Surrogates is an excellent science fiction short story that happens to be a graphic novel. The plot is compelling with a well-crafted premise that extends traditional "cyberspace" works (such as the worlds created by William Gibson and P.K. Dick, as well as The Matrix), but this new space is a virtual reality based on remotely-controlled androids. The author touches on issues related race, religion, and what it means to "live" as a human. Every dialog line is well-written, and both the protagonists and antagonists are believable and worthy of empathy.