Stylistic Abstraction and Corporeal Mapping in The Surrogates

Review of: Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates. Issues 1–5. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006.

In the tradition of Blade Runner (1981), Akira (the early 1980s comics and film), Neuromancer (1984), Watchmen (1987), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Dark City (1998), the Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), and other neocyberpunk texts, The Surrogates, a five-issue serialized comic, deploys a host of traditional postmodern science fiction motifs, themes and gadgetry as fortification for its tech-noir storyline. The main prescriptions for the plot include a formative crime, a protagonist who is forced to solve that crime, a gradual process of psychological awakening that echoes the method of crime-solving, an urban labyrinth setting, and high-tech machinery that has gone hog-wild and produced a dystopian society. Surrogates uses this genre recipe, harnessing the techniques of past futurologies and narrative spaces as conceived by the cyberpunks of the 1980s. The comic differs from its forerunners, however, by representing a post-capitalist condition that is defined by stylistic abstraction rather than by the stylistic superspecificity of former conceptions. William Gibson’s novelistic version of cyberspace, for instance, is propelled by hyperdescriptive language and imagery, and the cyberspace of the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix films (flagrantly extrapolated from Gibson) is entirely rendered by state-of-the-art special effects. Illustrator Weldele works in a different style. He minimalizes and abstracts the stylization of many previous cyberpunk forms by consistently composing panels that look like sketches more than finished products. As such, he constructs an innovative mapping of the body. In Matters of Gravity, Scott Bukatman explains:

Comics narrate the body in stories and envision the body in drawings. The body is obsessively centered upon. It is contained and delineated; it becomes irresistible force and unmovable object. . . . The body is an accident of birth, a freak of nature, or a consequence of technology run wild. The . . . body is everything—a corporeal, rather than a cognitive, mapping of the subject into a cultural system.

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Bukatman’s analysis focuses on the superhero body, but his general idea can be applied to other comics. Surrogates thus corporeally maps the subject into a system distinguished by technological excess and denaturalization (cyberpunk’s overriding themes). Unlike former maps, this one demonstrates an aesthetic destylization to represent the nature of machinic desire and selfhood. By destylization, I mean calculatedly threadbare graphics that indicate a “mode of awareness” in the science-fiction genre, which has consistently functioned as “a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. 388). More specifically, The Surrogates revises the nature of cyberpunk subjectivity, which has generally been perceived in dystopian terms. It does so by illustrating (through the medium of its illustration) how cyberpunk texts are positively charged—not technologically ravished dystopias, but nostalgic matrices of hope and promise gesturing in utopian directions.

Set in the Backbone District of Central Georgia Metropolis in 2054, The Surrogates depicts a future where 92% of adult humans supplant themselves with androids. In lieu of going to work or to dinner parties, people spend their time in a somnambulant state, reclining on lounge chairs. Their real, docile bodies are remotely wired into mechanical bodies by means of spider-like mechanisms placed on the temples. Surrogates experience the actual goings-on of daily life for their human users, who experience the full spectrum of sensory impressions through their surrogates. This science-fictional novelty is the maypole around which revolve the action and plot of the comic. The protagonist is Harvey Greer, a police lieutenant in search of a serial killer. Greer himself owns and uses a surrogate, which divides him against himself. As a cop, his surrogate technology protects him in the event of being wounded or killed (he can simply get another one); at the same time, he resents being dependent upon technology, physically and emotionally, and wants to exist purely as a real person. This tension is set against the main plot: Greer’s hunt for the serial killer, a surrogate named Steeplejack. Steeplejack is owned and operated by Lionel Canter, former employee of Virtual...