Venditti fleshes out this graphic novel with fake magazine articles, religious tracts, and market surveys. One of the issues that are brought out by the surrie-committed murder, for instance, is whether there needs to be an age-restriction on surrogate use. The three rich kids who went slumming in their dads' units, for instance, had zero sense of responsibility for what they were actually doing; they act, as Chattie notes, like kids playing a first person shooter videogame.
Yet one of the book's supplements, a market survey aimed at parents of the potential youth consumer, makes it clear the corporation is looking toward tapping into the parental desire to protect their kids from harm. And as readers of the first GN know, surrogates will become ubiquitous in the further future.
To be sure, the use of surrogates can have its practical advantages. In the book's climax, our hero Greer himself connects to a surrogate body for the first time to protect himself when the city erupts in riots. The repoed unit he's been given turns out to be black, a pointed thematic touch in itself.
Artist Brett Weldele blends sketchy pen and ink lines with painterly washes and tones to good effect. It's a suitably noir-ish visual style that doesn't sacrifice visual clarity for moodiness, evoking the GN's urban milieu without overwhelming it. If his visual characterizations at times look a bit too beholden to modern teevee cop shows, it's not a serious flaw. Bet it helped when they sold the first Surrogates as a movie to Touchstone Films: I can see Bruce Willis as Greer, and so, I suspect, could Venditti and Weidele.
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