Robert Venditti

Robert Venditti is an American comic book writer, known for his work on the Top Shelf Productions title The Surrogates, which was adapted to a major motion picture starring Bruce Willis directed by Jonathan Mostow for Disney. and for the Valiant Comics title X-O Manowar. He is also known for his work on DC Comics titles such as The Flash, Green Lantern, Justice League, and Hawkman. He has also adapted the Percy Jackson & The Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus book series by Rick Riordan into graphic novels. Robert Venditti was born in Memorial Hospital and raised in Hollywood, and Pembroke Pines, Florida. Though he says he always wanted to be a prose writer, he rarely read comics as a child, but would peruse the comics at the barber shop. He later moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida where he received a B.A. in Political Science and English. After college he worked as a clerk at a law firm in southern Florida with aspirations to practice law, but found that work not to his liking. After subsequently worked pumping gas on a fuel truck, he moved to the Port St. John/Titusville area in Brevard County to which his parents had moved, where he attended the University of Central Florida, working at a Borders Books store in Winter Park, while earning his M.A. in Creative Writing. In about 2000, while working at Borders, a coworker recommended comics books as reading material to him. Though the skeptical Venditti initially thought of comics as solely for children, his reading of Kurt Busiek's Astro City impressed him enough to decide to change his career aspirations from prose to comics. In 2002 Venditti attended a convention and met Chris Staros from Top Shelf Productions, and was added to Staros' email list. That April, Staros subsequently sent out a mass email announcing that Top Shelf's distributor was going bankrupt, and asking recipients of the email to place orders to aid the distributor. Venditti contacted Staros to offer help, and ending up doing warehouse work for him. Venditti began working on The Surrogates in July 2002, and after finishing the script that December, he gave it to Staros, who decided to publish it through Top Shelf, despite the fact that it was not typical of the material they usually published. The first issue of the five-issue miniseries was published in July 2005, and the fifth in March 2006. The prequel Surrogates: Flesh & Bone, was released in September 2009, the same month as the release of the feature film adaptation of the first miniseries, starring Bruce Willis. In May 2012 Venditti began writing the X-O Manowar series for Valiant Entertainment. Venditti began his first work for DC Comics when he took over from Paul Cornell on Demon Knights beginning with issue #16, and took over Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps in June 2013.