Green Lantern and X-O Manowar’s Robert Venditti on Mainstream Comics, The Future and Unity

Robert Venditti, who relaunched Valiant Entertainment’s X-O Manowar last year and who currently writes Green Lantern for DC Comics, came into the “Summer of Valiant” in 2012 best known for his work on The Surrogates, his creator-owned original graphic novel that was adapted into a film starring Bruce Willis.He did not, at the time, seem a particularly logical candidate for a mainstream superhero book, and there were those who figured that he would be on X-O for an issue before leaving and going back to his more personal work.He’s gone the other way, though, becoming a key part of the overall plan at Valiant and helping Joshua Dysart, Fred Van Lente and Dwayne Swierczynski “showrun” the first year of Valiant’s return.Venditti sat down with ComicBook.com to discuss the last year, what’s next to come for him at Valiant…and how his work ties into a little something called Unity.ComicBook.com: Is it a little bit odd, going from somebody who’s known basically as an indie or creator-owned guy to suddenly being a huge hit as a work-for-hire creator?Robert Venditti: No, I mean it’s actually the reason why I did it. I’m very much about, every time I pick a new project, doing something that I haven’t done before. So all the early stuff I did was creator owned and when an opportunity came along to write X-O for Valiant and it was a chance to work on an established property, it was something I wanted to do becuase I wanted to challenge myself in a new way.And I know there’s sort of a big debate in comics about creator owned versus work-for-hire. Work-for-hire stifles creativity or whatever. From my perspective, I think creator-owned is one type of creativity becuase you make it up, you can do whatever you want. But in a work-for-hire scenario, you’re doing X-O Manowar or Green Lantern or whatever, they hand you a concept and say “This is a story about a Visigoth warrior who gets kidnapped by aliens and comes back to Earth in a sentient suit of armor”–that’s a massive set of constraints they’re putting on you, so that’s a whole other kind of creativity where you have to be creative inside this set of constraints. There’s a whole school of thought in art that constraints actually breed creativity.So for me I think a balance of creator-owned and working on established property is a nice balance.