BUT, the formulaic crime-drama style seems to totally undermine the potential of that world--especially in terms of character development, thus (at least for those of us that reside on the human-connection side of the spectrum) hindering reader-identification. That pulls you out of the narrative in my book, and if you don't care too much about the characters in the story--no matter how great the conceptual-world is--you don't care too much about the narrative underway. Even if you have a wonderful conceptual backdrop I think its 95% necessary to have very identifiable uniquely driven characters to pull people in. But not just "pull people in": really do something significant and cathartic, to the point where they really do care, and can fall in love with the universe of circumstance that's surrounding those characters on a level that brings everything to life (Eg. Starwars, re-Star-Trek, District 9, Y the Last Man, Battlestar Galactica, pretty much everything Whedon has ever done (even kinda Toy Story & granted Dollhouse is just getting there), and on and on and on). I almost think that's what makes meaningful, successful Sci-Fi and Fantasy (at least when there are large socially/politically relevant circumstances at hand). The SUBJECTIVE human element is what makes it matter. When you have an impersonal, universal concept, you need a very personal ground-level place to set the focus.
Big concept, immediate meaningful subject---that's what it's all about right now, between Einstein, the economy, the politics, three-dimensional interactive television, and vacuum-robots that eat things you drop on the floor, it's what people need in our present socio-ecological situation. (eg. Pomo -> 'Altermo'?)
All of "The Surrogates" seems kind of impersonal and bland, formulaic, like Law and Order (<--everybody running around playing with dead people, and rapists, and murderers, and you never even see the inside or their apartments where they're probably drinking themselves to sleep at night). Perhaps this just isn't Vendetti's strong suit, and this will (hopefully, because there is so much great potential here) be a case where the movie adaption more successfully delivers, and at once expands, what's been offered up here. Interestingly enough, the way Vendetti's set the story up seems like it should be a movie, not a comic--and that it will work much better as such (--action driven, visual landscapes, core base-protagonist that's someone Bruce Willis can hop in and play--). If the marketing says anything about it, hopefully it will deliver--
--hopefully it will really manifest a concept and be able to get at people's throats while involving them in the 'play'. I just wish these marketing schemes behind wonderfully constructed corporate funded sci-fi endeavors would take it a step further. It's always just a marketing thing, for the buzz etc.--a business model--viral, guerrilla, new-media, whatever: it's never taken deeper into part of the actual medium and narrative, but remains a means to an end upon that mediums release ( 1 ).
Fans are still taking it upon their own initiative to 'involve in the media' on a visceral level, and in that atmosphere the involvement can only be taken seriously by the fanatical and the escapists, or by anyone ballsy enough to ignore reality and go the 'play' alone: (--all dressed up in your personalized Battlestar Galactica dogtags with nowhere legitimizing to go--). It's the kind of thing that's going to have to stem from one big breakthrough in the entertainment world (to alter people's sense of what's possible and legitimate), and from the ground up. Because even in the best of worlds, the 'Industry' and the people that work in it are either concerned with industry standards and deliverables (Eg. money for money) or too busy working their fingers to the bone inside of it to do their thing and create their creations the secure, reliable way.
But back to Surrogates.
Even if you give the author the benefit of the doubt, that he made conscious decisions to do things this way, it isn't working. An attempt to go over the top with impersonal
edge..? Yeah, not so much. There's nothing to contrast the bland "personality take-over" to without at least one primary, uniquely driven and conflicted central starting point. You need to have some meaty good stuff before you can rip it open and spill those guts on the table--and you need a real-looking person, a real-feeling character before there's a response to it's face falling off (it's the moment Terminator cut into his forearm before the act of tearing up a human-looking android got it's own status quo).Even the antagonist feels two dimensional. And I'm not sure what it was, or if it was even intentional, but the way black people were treated in the narrative was ishy. Maybe there's a larger political thing he's trying to say about minorities, or maybe it's an Atlanta, Georgia cultural context that I'm totally unaware of, but this didn't feel open ended enough, and I kept waiting for some conclusive punch to an end 'message' that was being set up but it never came...
The protagonist is real, not fictional, and becomes real to readers, when delivered by the right conductors--the right MEDIUMS that will balance the character of the content with our reality-based sensitivities, deliver their livliness to our concept of reality.
Thre is the same kind of de-sensitizing effect with the art-- it seems like an attempt to de-personalize the setting, literally wash it out, to only hop up the details on certain significant objects, etc. But
it just doesn't work, especially given the new-media esque style of the story. You need genuine faces here (actors provide all that's missing without having to create it seperately--they give us a highly individualized empty cell, or vehicle for the character).The whole point is that these Surrogates, these robots, are real simulations, and that the contrast between them and the 'Boners' (not a reference to what some people might be doing using the robots for, but a slang term in the series for real, physically present, human-bodied people) is their warm-blooded gritty reality. The loss of identity delt with here by the subject matter is a subtle and psychic one, not a visual one--it's of the individual and of living energy, maybe even going as far as raising questions of our 'souls' (where do they really live?!) in the face of avatars and technology.
Hence: artwork, story approach, general filter over the package: great package but when you get down to it...ERRRN-, not working. I'd like to see this become a larger more collaborative circuit (movies, tv would probably work well) or even just be expanded into a larger comic-series (sans Brett Weldele on the inside panels, as interesting and stylistically refined as he is).
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Notes!:
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- For example, Dollhouse had an alternate reality interactive video blog online (www.rprimelabs.com - recently taken down, hopefully because they're going to do something new) pre-release that went so far as to have an actor playing an unknown doll (Hazel/Foxtrot) interact with and rely on 'viewers' to get her out of a dramatic jam. But even many of the hard-core Joss Whedon fans still don't know about it while it was happening, and it's something that could have been extremely significant via viewer-participation not only for campaigning at a point of desperation when the show was almost canceled, but for building upon the narrative without the prime-time slot if it was canceled, and generating awareness and marketing virally throughout the time prior to this season. The older generation that's 'running the show' in the entertainment business just doesn't think this way. That is going to change.
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