Graphic Novel Reporter, a website for buyers and sellers of comics, has released its 2010 Core Graphic Novels List.  A guideline for retailers and librarians interested in starting a graphic novel section, or expanding the one they already have, the list offers suggestions by categorizing graphic novels in groups labeled The Core Ten, The Next 25, and The Expanded List: 100 More.  The Surrogates and The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone made the cut, both books appearing as a joint entry on The Expanded List.

I’m never sure what the value of lists like these are, or who uses them as a resource, but any day that my books are listed alongside Alec and The Complete Peanuts is a good day indeed.

From last night’s College Championship edition of America’s Favorite Quiz Show^®, Jeopardy!:

The category was “Graphic Novels,” and The Surrogates shared the column with such titles as The Photographer and Maus.  Young James from Santa Clara University went on to win the evening’s contest, a victory that I like to think Brett Weldele and I contributed to.  An utterly false assumption, of course, but I like to think it anyway. 

It’s not as good as an appearance on Sesame Street (in my opinion, the epitome of pop-culture notoriety), but we all “got a charge out of it,” as Grandpa used to say.  On a less egocentric note, I find it significant that the graphic novel art form is now assumed to be so ubiquitous that it merits a series of five clues to be read by Alex Trebek, with not a one of them referencing anything published by Marvel or DC.

We’ve come a long way, Baby.

When I first saw the above video four months ago, I thought it was hysterical (as most things about The Daily Show are), a witty commentary on the plight of what was once considered the gold standard in reporting.  Today I find it an affront to one of our nation’s—nay, our planet’s—most esteemed journalistic institutions, a misguided and mean-spirited jab that is neither amusing nor even remotely intelligent.

Why the sudden grind of gears?  Unabashed self-interest, of course, as the first volume of The Surrogates has been a New York Times best-seller for two weeks running.  Currently occupying the 6^th spot on the paperback graphic novel list, there’s no way to know how long it will hold ground before retreating to number 11.  (On any given week, how many writers are utterly convinced that their book fills that ignominious slot?)  No matter how fleeting, though, there’s no denying that for the rest of my days I will be “New York Times Best-selling Author Robert Venditti.”

The bell I hear ringing, the bell that will ring for eternity, is not the low toll that announces the passage of time, but the cheery, high-pitched ding! every time my rank on The List is put to promotional use.

As part of the behind-the-scenes material at the end of the collected edition of The Surrogates, we included a deleted scene that shows Harvey attempting to negotiate a tryst with a futuristic lady of the night (Pages 186-189, for those following along at home).  For reasons I explain in those pages, the scene clearly wasn’t working in its original draft, but the basic idea—showing what the world’s oldest profession would look like in an age of surrogates—appealed to me.  Prostitutes are a staple of detective stories, and I wanted to put my own spin on the concept.    

Just because an idea isn’t working at the moment, that doesn’t mean it should be discarded completely.  Top Shelf editor Chris Staros has a useful analogy: abandoned ideas are like old, junk cars in the backyard that you can go to for spare parts when needed.  When it came time to write Flesh and Bone, I needed a scene that would take Harvey from A to B, from the start of his investigation to his first big clue.  So I picked through the wrecks out back and found the right part for the job. 

It occurred to me that I could take the premise of the deleted scene and work it into the new book in a way that was more consistent with Harvey as a character (the evolved version appears on Pages 50-55).  Now, instead of him visiting the prostitute in search of companionship, he questions her at her place of business, the fictional brothel Gandy Land, and comes away with a key piece of information to keep the plot moving forward.  Same effect—giving the reader a glimpse at the seedier side of surrogacy—but used in a way that serves the story.    

I’ve only been writing comics since 2002, but there’s already quite a collection of junkers cluttering the lawn.  No telling how many will offer up roadworthy parts, or how many will rust away to nothing . . . 

(Side Note: While Page 50 of Flesh and Bone shows the neon sign hanging outside Gandy Land, the logo and tagline at the top of this post never appear in the book.  They were created for a limited run of t-shirts I gave away to friends.  Thanks to J Chris Campbell for the design and Rob Ullman for the silhouette.  Nobody draws the ladies like Ullman.)

Dwight and Swain are a couple of guys from Atlanta that host Sidebar, one of the finer podcasts I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest on.  Their latest episode is up, featuring a rather extensive interview with yours truly.  The interview runs over an hour, covering everything from how I got my start in comics to how the Surrogates movie deal came about, and more.  You can check out the Sidebar website and download the episode here.

(WARNING: We get a little loose with the language during our conversation, so this one’s not for the kiddies.  Apologies to my mother, who certainly raised me better.)

Thanks to the good folks at iVerse Media, all five chapters of The Surrogates are now available for download at the iTunes App Store.  You get Chapters 1 and 2 for 99¢, and then the remaining 3 chapters are available as in-app purchases for an additional 99¢ each.  That’s the whole story for less than 4 bucks, and not a single tree will be felled in exchange for your patronage.  Even Mother Nature wins. 

While I’ve certainly never considered The Surrogates to be an all-ages read, I was a little surprised to see the laundry list of content advisories Apple used to describe the apps.  “Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling” may be my favorite, as I have no idea what it could possibly be referring to . . . 

I’m often asked about the writing process and what goes into the creation of a book.  As the third of four recurring features on this website, (un)scripted will shed light on what happens during gestation, all of the little incidents and surprises that coax a story into being.  The story behind the story, so to speak.                                                   

All stories have a beginning, and The Surrogates was no different.  Here’s the test page submitted by Brett Weldele back in 2003, the first page of art ever drawn from one of my scripts (with a pair of Brett’s early coloring schemes at the bottom):

From all the pages of story (the entire script was finished before Top Shelf began searching for an artist), Brett selected this to be his audition.  At first glance it may seem an odd choice for a sci-fi/detective story—why not draw an action sequence, or at least a page that features SteepleJack, the story’s most visually striking character?  Those would’ve been more obvious submissions, but I was thrilled to see this, a subtler moment that reveals something about the relationship between two characters.  He had no way of knowing it at the time, but Brett had picked one of my favorite scenes in the book.  Coincidence?

During the course of my creative writing education in college and grad school, the difference between “genre” and “literary” fiction was often cited as being that the former is plot-centered, while the latter is character-centered.  Oversimplified definitions to be sure, but not completely valueless in the sense that strong characters are what make for a good story.  When you get down to it, there are a finite number of plots out there in the ether (war, romance, heist, etc.), but there are an infinite number of character possibilities.  Whether I succeed or fail is for others to judge, but I always try to ground my stories in character.

So for Brett to pick this page (Page 24 of the collected edition, for those following along at home) as his first to draw suggested something greater than coincidence was at work—it signaled that he had the same affinity for character that I do.  It’s one of the reasons (his unique talent being another, his ability to establish mood through color being yet another . . . ) that I believed from the start he was the perfect artist for the book.  And he has proved himself to be every step of the way.

A common question: As a writer, where do your ideas come from?  There’s really no definitive answer—suddenly an idea for a story will pop into my head, where a moment before it didn’t exist.  In some cases there may have been a real-life topic that interested me for some time, but how and why real life crosses over into the realm of stories is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else.  I can, however, pinpoint where my inspiration to write comes from.  There a few sources, in fact, one of which is this:

According to Wikipedia, the photo, sometimes referred to as “Lunch on a Skyscraper,” was taken by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932, and the girder the men are seated on is part of what would become the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City (copyright is either Charles C. Ebbets, New York Herald Tribune, or Bettman Archive).  It’s a fairly prevalent image that pops up in all kinds of places, and I’ve liked it ever since seeing it for the first time at a restaurant when I was a kid.  Aside from it being an amazing shot, it has always represented to me the idea that everyone has a story to tell.  No matter how everyday someone’s everyday life may seem, there are events and experiences that make that life theirs and theirs alone.

I paid tribute to these eleven laborers with a bit of dialogue from SteepleJack in The Surrogates (Page 46 of the collected edition, for those following along at home).  Wizard reprinted the page in their “Secret Stash” column for issue #166, one of the first print reviews of the book.  I had the article framed as a table display for conventions, and once it outlived its usefulness I hung it on the wall of my office.  It wasn’t until years later, as I was showing the Wizard piece to a reporter who’d come by to interview me, that I realized I had unwittingly hung the article right beside my framed version of the Skyscraper print.  Just one of those events of happenstance that reinforces my belief that the subconscious is usually hard at work while the conscious mind is sleeping at the switch.

(Side Note: As far as tributes to Ebbets’ famous photo go, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one better than this.)

For a few years my family lived in Port St. John, Florida, part of an area known as the Space Coast because of nearby Kennedy Space Center.  I was shooting pool at a bar one night with a guy whose name is lost to me now, and when I asked him what he did for a living, he said he was a janitor (pursuing a career in the “custodial arts,” as Judd Nelson snidely remarked in The Breakfast Club).  Big deal, right?  Well this guy, as it turned out, was a janitor at NASA.  He worked in the Vehicle Assembly Building where the space shuttles are prepped for launch, and as an employee of NASA he was able to watch the launches from a restricted location much closer to the pad than anywhere the general public had access to.  This was over a decade ago, and I don’t recall how many countries had active space programs at the time.  Regardless, there certainly weren’t many places on the planet where one could be in close proximity to a space vehicle of any type, much less a shuttle orbiter, arguably the pinnacle of mankind’s technological achievement.  And here this guy was emptying trash bins next to them on a daily basis. 

Everyone has a story to tell.

I’ll be back on Monday with the introductory installment of this website’s third recurring feature, (un)scripted.

When I wrote the script for The Surrogates in 2002, I conceptualized the story as being a logical extension of the way people were using the Internet as a means to create new identities for themselves—through chatting, gaming, and message boards—the idea being that rather than jail your new identity within the computer, a surrogate would let you send it out into the world and experience life for you.  Here I was making this up in my noggin, wondering if everyone would think the premise of people living through mind-controlled machines too far-fetched.  Well, Wired has posted a featurette that shows a group of engineers and futurists detailing how close current technology is to making the fictional world of The Surrogates a reality:

Eerie stuff.  I’ve encountered numerous news items similar to this one over the years, which I’ll post here as one of four recurring Monday features until I run out.  Or until the first surrogate showroom opens downtown, at which time the future really will be now (then?), and the point will be outdated.

h+ Magazine, chroniclers of all things cool and tech, has posted a thoughtful review of Flesh and Bone that includes a pair of interior pages from the book.  I always take it as a great compliment when someone from the tech world has nice things to say about The Surrogates, since their days are surely steeped in futuristic speculation.  Kind of like having Dr. J say that you know how to drive the lane.

In the article, the reviewer mentions the fictional brothel Gandy Land, which Greer visits during the course of his investigation.  The evolution of this seedy location is something I plan to write about eventually in the recurring (un)scripted feature, which will debut here on August 31.