On Oct. 30, Robert Venditti, a local comic book writer, came to our school and spoke to students about his comics, his personal writing process, the comic book industry in general, and more. Mr. Venditti wrote The Surrogates, which was late adapted into a major motion picture starring Bruce Willis. He also writes for DC Comics, he wrote Percy Jackson comics, Green Lantern, The Flash, and more. Mr. Venditti did not grow up reading comics, he said, “I actually started reading comics in 2000 and I wrote my first comic in 2002.” 

Robert Venditti spent the majority of his time answering questions. One student asked him, “Can you still write comics if you can’t draw?” He responded by explaining how you don’t have to be a good artist to write comics, you just need to be descriptive so an artist can arrange the characters and scenes into each panel. He says, “…I’m living proof of it myself.” Mr. Venditti also said, some comic artists, “…take 7-10 pages of the pros and condense it into one image…” a single panel of art is called a splash page. However, when it comes to stuff like establishing a world, like a world unfamiliar to people, like fantasy, science, fiction or historic time periods, “…the panels need to be more detailed compared to, for example, a highschool scene, everyone knows what a highschool is like…” Robert Venditti said, “Always ground your characters to your personal life experiences… base your comics on what you know.” He explained how his Guy Gardener comics, were based off of some of his childhood friends.

Mr. Venditti’s tips impacted some of the students attending, including Jonas Lovern and Selene Bishop-O’Byrne. Jonas said, “…my usual Raider time was full… I had no idea who he was but thoroughly enjoyed his presentation.” He said Mr. Venditti”s tips on how to start a comic book or novel would be very beneficial to him with his future writing assignments. Jonas explained Mr. Venditti was, “…very charismatic and made a non-comic reader such as myself interested in the subject.” Selene, however, said she had read a few of his comics before, and attended the Wellness because she was very interested in comics. She said that Mr. Venditti was, ”…extremely nice and he taught really well… I learned some very interesting facts about comics and the writing and process of making comics.”