Dehumanization In Brett Weldele's The Surrogates

Ever heard of the saying “too much of a good thing”? The Surrogates is a book that plays with the idea of a society becoming too dependent on a new form of socializing and moving about their daily lives. In 2054, people have the choice to live life through a surrogate, a fully functioning humanoid robot. If we look at todays society, people have a hard time not using social media too much, imagine if you could literally live though another person. Do you see any foreseeable issues with dehumanizing a society? The author, Robert Venditti, and artist, Brett Weldele use a variety of graphic novel forms past authors have used to fully engage the reader. I enjoyed reading the book because it is relatable to present day society, and the graphic

Some of the notable benefits of having less human interaction are less diseases being spread and a general increase in public safety. Similarly, there are benefits to present day social media. The ability to never lose track of any friends from previous years of life, the ability to creep on people without them knowing, and a closer connection to famous people are all very nice things. Everyone has friends or family that they know wouldn’t be able to function two days without their social media fixes. There are actual institutions for social media rehab today. People that get too caught up in social media lose the ability to function normally. The end of the book points to a very tragic example of this that leaves the reader with a bitter taste on which to close the book. Long story short, a man who dedicated his life to ridding the world of surrogates prompted his own wife’s suicide after the destruction of her own surrogate. After her surrogate was destroyed she lost it and took her own life. The ending of the story is intense, it makes the reader think about how a small change in society can send many people down a path that leads to abuse and worse. In the book, the surrogate humanoid was originally developed to help disabled people, but the popularity caused the majority of the population to buy in. The inventor resented the fact that so many people

The actual graphics in the book are well thought out and range from rough sketches to real life pictures. The majority of the book is “comic book-like”, as in it mostly contains a form of sketches, looking to be hand-drawn, along with the traditional use of bubbles, gutters and panels. There are a lot of action scenes in the book that benefit from the traditional comic book form. In comparison to some of the other books from class the form is most similar to V for vendetta. In both books, the graphics not only exist to give an illustration, but they are there to so the reader can fully experience the action each author is trying to share. Moreover, there is action in the text Persepolis, but the black and white images don’t excite the reader like the actions scenes in either V for vendetta or The Surrogates do. Another comparison i would like to point out is the use of real pictures like the ones in Maus. In Maus, Art Spiegelman inserts real life pictures to humanize his already dehumanized text. For example on page 102, the insertion of the other comic book around his mothers suicide, looks like it could be from another text all together. In Surrogates, the end of chapter 4 is a good example of the addition of real pictures in the book. As I stated earlier, Surrogates plays with the principles of a dehumanizing society. The insertion of actual