An interview conducted by Nolan Reese
May 21, 2003
Everyone has those comics that make it to the top of their must-read pile every month—the ones that you dive into first when you get back from the comic shop. For me, they are ALIAS, X-STATIX, DAREDEVIL and a Vertigo book called Y: THE LAST MAN. Y may have a simple premise (last man on earth), but month after month it proves to be one of the most compelling books on the market. In anticipation for a recent signing appearance at Boston’s Comicopia in Kenmore Square, I had the opportunity to talk to the Y’s writer Brian K. Vaughan about Y, his two new Marvel Tsunami books, RUNAWAYS and MYSTIQUE, and a verity of other projects including THE HOOD and his recent X2 Prequel.
Nolan Reese: I’d like to start by asking a little about your background. How did you get your start in comics?
Brian K.Vaughan: I was actually a sophomore at New York University in the film and dramatic writing program. There was something called the Stanhattan project— I guess it’s a take-off on the Manhattan project named after Stan Lee— that a couple of Marvel editors had put together. It was the early 90s and Marvel was becoming sort of incestuous, where its writers were its editors who used to be the assistant editors who used to be the interns. So they were sort of cannibalizing themselves and they wanted to go out and find new writers. So these two editors came to NYU to scout potential writers, and they taught us about what a comic script looks like and the ins and outs of the business. They liked some of my samples, so they threw me little assignments, scripting gigs and whatnot. And I sort of crawled my way up the later after that.
NR: Did you have any interest in comics before that?
BKV: Yeah, sure. I’d been reading ever since I was a little kid and probably, like most kids, I got my first comic around 7 or so, probably when I was home sick one day. You know? Mom and dad bring one back from the drug store. But, by the time I was in High School I had a pretty full-blown addiction to them. Probably after I read WATCHMEN for the first time, that’s when I began to recognize that there were writers, specific writers, behind these books, and I had an interest in it. But, I never really knew how one would go about getting into writing comics, so I was real fortunate that this program popped up.
NR: Did you wind up finishing film school?
BKV: I ended up finishing for whatever that’s worth. It’s a good experience because obviously you can’t go to college to write comics nor should you, I think. But I think film school is probably as close to that as possible since there’s a lot to be gained from learning the three-act structure. Comics are essentially films with fewer frames per second.
NR: So you’re not really interested in pursuing a career in directing?
BKV: I don’t know, I go back in fourth. Being in film school, every film you work on is sort of like a failed science experiment where you set up these lofty goals and it always goes terribly awry. It’s really frustrating. Whereas comics are a lot of fun to work on because you have a limitless budget and you have a lot more control over the finished product. So I know there’s more money to be had in Hollywood, but for me the creative freedom that comes with comics is more appealing. Down the line if I could be in a position where I could be in a little more control over what happened in the movie maybe I would, but I don’t really have the hunger right now.
NR: So if anyone calls to try and option Y, you’re not interested?
BKV: Oh, man, that’s been going on for a while now. I’m interested in that, but that’s a little different because, with a Y movie— and I do think we’ll probably wind up optioning it— I think Pia Guerra, the artist and co-creator of the book and I probably wouldn’t be involved too much. I take sort of a Zen-like approach to it, and I hope if they did end up making the film it would be something different from the comic. Even if they do end up optioning Y, it won’t necessarily involve me being a filmmaker in any capacity.
NR: I know a lot of people, my self-included, were first exposed to you work with Y and HOOD. What books did you work on before that? I know you did SWAMP THING…
BKV: I did SWAMP THING, yeah. After the Stanhattan project I just got a bunch of weird gigs, things like scripting, which really isn’t done too much anymore…
NR: That’s writing dialogue?
BKV: Yeah, exactly. Just write the dialogue and someone else writes the plot. Sometimes, one guy would write the plot, he’d quit halfway through, the editor would write the middle and the artist would come in and come up with his or her own idea how to finish the story. Then they’d send me these pages, and it was kind of a choose your own adventure book— you could assemble them in any order and make any story you wanted. I’m sure I have a lot of awful dialogue stuff at Marvel in my background.
NR: That was known as the Marvel method?
BKV: Yeah, the Marvel Method. Stan Lee sort of pioneered it because he was writing 600 books a month and he had brilliant artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby so you could afford to do it that way. But I think its really fallen out of vogue, I don’t think anybody does it that way anymore. I think everyone does it full script now, which is dialogue and plot together. Regardless, I got a lot of crappy dialogue stuff in my background. I did three issues of BATMAN not too long ago with Scott McDaniels as the artist and I was really proud of those. As far as my superhero stuff goes, it’s probably the best cape and tights stuff I worked on. Then there was SWAMP THING and THE HOOD, a CHAIMBER mini-series no too long ago… I’m sure a million other things but that’s what pops into my brain right now.
NR: So, where did Y come from, and how did you get to pitch that to Vertigo?
BKV: To Vertigo’s credit, it was at the time when SWAMP THING was right about to get shit canned. I sort of tanked one of their franchises, so they didn’t have to pursue anything else with me. But I think they liked my writing and they saw there was something there and they asked me if I had any other ideas. Y had always been in the back of my head. I think it was born out of that grade school fantasy that a lot of nerds like me had, which was “I could probably get the cute red-headed girl that sits across from me, if only every other boy in the entire school dies.’ It was kind of taking that fantasy and subverting it to show what a nightmare it would really be. I always liked the idea of taking a real, broad, high concept that could easily be a Cinamax after hours wank-fest movie and treating it as seriously as possible and showing every political and socio-economic ramification of it.
NR: It was originally going to be a mini-series?
BKV: I’d always planned for it to be an ongoing, but some people at Vertigo had cold feet. Understandably so since I ruined SWAMP THING for all time. Karen Berger, in particular, though it was a really good idea, but could it sustain an ongoing series? I think she thought maybe it would be more like a hit-and-run, do six or ten issues and then get out or after that it would start to become stale. I think I was able to convince her that the world would be diverse enough that there are as many stories as there are women. She was nice enough to let me go ahead with it.
NR: One of the interesting things about Y is how quickly one of the major plot points was to be dealt with in the second arc. But then I started thinking, and I realized how many threads you left open from the first arc…
BKV: I worked really hard on that first issue, because I know these days you don’t have the benefit— I know Neil Gaiman always said with SANDMAN that it took about eight issues to really find his footing and for SANDMAN to really find itself. But these days, if you don’t knock it out of the park in the first issue people won’t come back for number two. So I did want to front load the first issue, with hints of things to come. Some of the stuff won’t pay off until the very end but there’s defiantly enough stuff in there to carry us through the first two years or so. There’s a lot setups and payoffs that that will be coming and subplots that will be addressed. We do have a really set road map, the book’s gonna end somewhere around issue 60, we plan for it to be about five years. So, we don’t have the benefit of this being a crazy X-MEN story where you can think up stuff and ten years from now maybe explain it or maybe not. Hopefully it’ll feel like stuff does get resolved quickly and excitingly, but there’s always some tantalizing mystery stuck in the background that you find out about.
NR: I know Vertigo sort of has a reputation of being a writers club, but you seem to have a strong collaboration with Pia, how did that develop?
BKV: Heidi MacDonald, who was the editor as the project was getting started— I’d written a detailed proposal and she’d thrown out a couple of artists that she thought would be interesting. Pia’s stuff was on the top of her pile of what she liked the best, and she just showed me a couple of pages and I said, “who ever this guy is, he’s the perfect guy for the book.” “Oh, It’s, Pia, actually, she’s a woman.” A lot of people think we picked a female artist to sort of balance out the lineup since it is a book about billions of women and one man, but when we were picking an artist I didn’t really care what their gender was, it’s more important that they were good and that they could make the characters feel like real people. Pia does that so we picked her for the book and she’s a really good sounding board. We talk on the phone at least once a month about whatever that script is, and she’ll yell at me if I do something dumb. Mostly she’ll just have good ideas that pop into her head about stuff we should cover in the future. That inspires me and we have a really good relationship.
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NR: Do you find it difficult to write a comic with a predominantly female cast?
BKV: No, I don’t. It’s a lot harder to write a comic where a guy’s got laser beams that come out of his eyes or SWAMP THING about talking vegetables. But, it’s just writing for me. I mean obviously men and women are different but I don’t think it’s such crutch that I happen to have a penis. I think if you interact with other human beings and have an imagination it’s not too hard.
NR: I was also intrigued by your choice of Yorick as a main character, since he’s sort of a flawed male character. He doesn’t always have all the answers and he’s always hung up on the girlfriend in Australia…
BKV: Yorick is a lot like me, I like to think, kind of younger and stupider. It’s really interesting because obviously Yorick is flawed and, I think, sort of an awful guy in a lot of capacities, but because he’s like me I think he’s sort of a cool guy. I’ve learned a lot about myself because whenever anyone compliments the book it’s always “It’s a really good book and it’s a really brave choice to go with Yorick because he’s such a loser. It’s really awesome that you didn’t pick this ubermensch to go in, he’s such a despicable nerd.” I like to think that I changed, but maybe not so much. That was always my intention, that the book would be no fun if Colin Farrell was the last guy alive, he’s just an awesome guy that everyone wants to bang. I’ve always thought of this as the story of the last boy on earth becoming the last man on earth and so hopefully that’ll be his journey.
NR: I’ve always heard Y mentioned as a book that appeals to non-comic readers. Have you seen that at all?
BKV: Yeah, that’s been really nice. My girlfriend’s mom reads the book and that’s cool. That was something we set out to do early on, cause whenever I pitched the concept to friends they thought it sounded potentially intriguing and appealing. So, when we set out to do it, Pia and I had a lot of discussions about the layouts of the page; that we would never do anything too crazy or Bendis-y, that we would just keep it nice and simple so that if you read the Sunday comics before in your local newspaper you could follow Y. We did set out to keep it accessible to people who hadn’t grown up reading comic books. It’s nice, it seems to be working and I’ve always wanted it to be one of those books that guys would pass to their girlfriends, or vise-versa, and carry into different relationships if they broke up.
NR: Is there a big difference between creating your own world, like in Y, or the Marvel books you’ve done which were pretty much set in a pre-existing universe?
BKV: There are benefits and drawbacks to both. Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you’ll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them. Working on the Marvel stuff, it’s fun to go into someone else’s sandbox where things have already been established for you and it gives you more leeway to work on the characters or your particular story. You don’t have to worry about all the ins and outs. Whereas, Y takes a really long time to write since I have to do a lot of research and think about every angle of every possible scenario.
NR: How did HOOD come about? I was kind of surprised since I was expecting it to be the origin of a down on his luck superhero kind of thing. Then he kills a cop and I was just surprised how dark it got. You don’t really see a lot of stories that are the origin of a super villain.
BKV: I think part of the reason my SWAMP THING run didn’t succeed was because it was about Tefe, the daughter of Swamp Thing, and I’ve always wanted her to be an awful person, to be the villain of her own book. People don’t really like reading about that. But, one of my favorite movies of all time is RAGING BULL and Robert DeNero is just an awful horrible person in that. I’ve always thought it’s more important for the protagonist to be interesting than it is for a protagonist to be likeable. So I thought maybe I could give that a shot with THE HOOD and tell a story about a guy whose fascinating and compelling but also a wretched person. Part of that is born out of— I always thought it was interesting that when kids got powers, especially teenage characters like Peter Parker, they would almost automatically end up doing good things with it. Whereas if I had gotten increasable powers when I was a teenager I would have done terrible things with it. The tag like of the story is the flipside of the old SPIDERMAN maxim; THE HOOD was “with great power comes great opportunity.”
NR: Will there be more HOOD projects in the future? I know the book ended with a little bit of a cliffhanger and there’s a “volume one” on the spine.
BKV: I don’t know, I think that “volume one” might be wishful thinking for Marvel. Some people were sort of let down by the open endedness of it, but, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was a movie I liked where it had sort of a similar open ended feeling where they established a lot of things that could happen to the character and they just leave you. I like those elliptical endings. Parker, the main character of the book, by his misdeeds throughout the series has created all of these problems for himself, once of which will probably kill him. But I thought by showing him suffer it becomes sort of like a dull, moralistic, crime doesn’t pay story. I actually ended that way without thinking that there would be any more HOOD because at the time all of my books were getting canceled and I didn’t really have any hit series. There was some talk of doing more HOOD but I don’t think it sold well enough. Maybe if it gets discovered in trade paperback and people really snatch up the trades something might happen, but for now THE HOOD is off to the great beyond.
NR: You also recently did an X-MEN 2 prequel. How difficult was it to work within the set space between two movies? How many guidelines were you given…?
BKV: A lot of guidelines and it was a little frustrating to work on. I did it because I know this guy Michael Droughty from NYU, he was one of the writers on X2. He’d given me sort of an inside scoop about stuff that they wish they’d done with Sabertooth but they just ran out of time to do in the second movie. So I thought it might be fun to do sort of a semi-official stab at that. It was kind of a fun experiment, I don’t know if it was totally successful. It is really hard because you’re trying to do a story for people who have maybe only seen the first movie and have never read another X-MEN book but you’re also trying to do a comic book for people who have been reading X-MEN books for 100 years and have seen the Wolverine/ Sabertooth fight 10,000 times. It’s a real challenge to try to make it successful; but also fresh and new and innovative. It’s really hard, I don’t think I figured out how to do it quite yet, but it’s a good exercise if nothing else.
NR: You also have two new comics from Marvel, RUNAWAYS and MYSTIQUE, both of which are all-ages books. Is it different from working on mature readers books like Y and HOOD?
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BKV: MYSTIQUE has gotten lumped into the Tsunami line as being an all-ages book. I think that’s more of a teenager and up PG-13 sort of sexy espionage book. RUNAWAYS is defiantly an all ages book and that’s not too different. It requires me to edit myself a little bit more because… It’s sort of based on the idea at some point in our lives, all of us think that our parents are the most evil people alive. What if they actually were? It’s about a bunch of kids who discover that their parents are actually super villains. They’re teenagers so I have to edit myself a little bit, because when I was a teenager I probably swore and did worse things than I do now. I have to find other ways to deal with it. The key to all ages books— I always think about PEEWEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, which is a really kick ass movie if you’re a kid or an adult. You find different things to like in it. I’m trying to write a book that I would have liked when I was 13 and that I would have liked now and hopefully will like in 10 years. I always write books for myself whether it’s Y or RUNAWAYS so it’s just a different way of going about it.
NR: Were RUNAWAYS and MYSTIQUE both your ideas or did Marvel come to you with them?
BKV: RUNAWAYS was my idea. They came to me and said they were looking to do a book with young protagonists, so RUNAWAYS popped out of my head shortly thereafter. MYSTIQUE obviously is a pre-existing character and they came to me and asked if I had any interest in doing that. I did cause I sort of like, as I said with SWAMP THING, characters who have complicated senses of morality. That’s the appeal of Mystique was that she wasn’t the traditional good guy. She wasn’t necessarily the villain since she doesn’t want to control the world or anything, she’s just has what she like to view as a civil rights agenda. Even thought the world views her as a terrorist, she thinks of herself as a freedom fighter for mutant rights. And also, I just wanted to do a fun espionage book since I don’t think there are enough good, over-the-top spy books in comics.
NR: And there’s that interesting premise: What if James Bond could shape shift?
BKV: Right. It’s sort of an ALIAS, but instead of her having another crappy wig week after week, it’s that she can be anyone. You don’t know if she’s the 85-year-old guy in the room or the 6-year-old girl. It’s fun to do a master of disguise book because there’s limitless story possibilities. She’s the 007 of the book, forced to work for Professor Xavier, the leader of the X-men, who’s sort of her M. There’s an old character named Forge, who’s a mutant born with the ability to build anything he imagines, so I thought he fit in pretty well as the gadget-guru, Q, of the book.
NR: So do you feel like someone won’t have to be particularly familiar with the X-Men to enjoy MYSTIQUE?
BKV: Yeah, that’s defiantly what I set out to do. All of her back-story is explained in the first issue. Everything you need to know about the X-men, about this world is all set up. I won’t say we ignore continuity but we don’t really dwell on it the book. I’ll consider it successful if my girlfriend’s mom who reads Y can read this and make sense of it. I don’t know I she’ll like it as much as Y, but she should be able to figure out who’s who and what’s going on.
NR: With RUNAWAYS it seems like you’re setting up another road story, is that accurate or…
BKV: No, I don’t think so. I know that’s become sort of my gimmick since SWAMP THING was about that and Y is too. The title is maybe a little deceptive. They defiantly run away from home, but they don’t run too far for specific reasons that will become apparent quickly. They’re not gonna be leaving the general Los Angeles area. Mostly because they still want to keep an eye on their parents and see what they could do about them. They will be setting up shop in a really cool secret hideout that we’ll reveal in the fifth or sixth issue.
NR: So the parents are gonna be a constant presence in the book? Without giving too much away…
BKV: Yeah, the parents will be there. The book won’t always be about week after week of the kids fighting their parents, there’ll be other threats that keep popping up, but I do think the parents will be kind of a constant looming presence, the ultimate big bad of the book.
NR: So, as with Y, is there a finite ending for RUNAWAYS?
BKV: Not so much. It’s easier to do that with Y because Pia and I own it so if at any moment we feel like pulling the rip chord and stopping it, we can. With the Marvel books, I don’t technically own them so if I feel like Runaways should end with number 20 that doesn’t mean they won’t hire Mark Millar to come in and kick my ass with a much better storyline for issue 21. So I play a lot more fast and loose with that one. I do have a good idea where the book is headed but I don’t have an ending in mind.
NR: With RUNAWAYS, I noticed you introduced characters in a similar way to Y, jumping around to different parts of, in this case, California and introducing all the kids and their parents one at a time.
BKV: Team books are really hard. Y is about a small trio of travelers; buy Yorick is really the heart of the book. Team books are hard since there are so many people to introduce, you want people to have feelings about each one of these kids so you do have to get in and get out very quickly and introduce all of them. I just wanted to give a little taste, in that first issue, of basically how old they are, what their parents do, and what their background is like. The first story arc is six issues and each issue we’ll get to know one of the kids a little bit better.
NR: I recently overheard someone in the comic book store saying, “I hope one of these titles gets canceled since I don’t want the quality of Y to suffer.’ What would you say in your defense?
BKV: I wouldn’t take any other books if I did [feel like I was overextending myself]. Its hard because I’ve been writing comics now—I was 19 when I sold my first story, so it’s been seven years, and it’s been seven years in a desert where I’ve been sitting around writing maybe one book a month if I was lucky. Every other day was coming up with a million ideas. When you get in the position where you’re fortunate enough to have one of your books successful and the phone starts ringing and people ask you, it’s very hard to say “no” to stuff. I have said no, I can’t say which cause I don’t want whoever takes over the book to think hat they weren’t the first choice, but I have said no to some pretty big projects at both Marvel and DC just because I don’t want to take just anything. Like MYSTIQUE, I think a lot of people were surprised. Why the hell would I do a comic about the naked blue girl from X-men? But I do think I had a lot of good stories to tell there and not-as-good stories for other things that I turned down. I think four titles a month would defiantly be my limit. If you ever see me do more than four you know I’m just a hack and I’m doing it for the money. But four, I think that’s totally reasonable, a little over a week with each book, and I don’t have a life. I don’t drink or play video games, which I think is Bendis’ rule for having to write four comic books a month. I don’t fell like I’m overextending myself yet, but I’m sure people will let me know if they feel the work is suffering.
NR: Do you have a potential fourth title yet or are you keeping your options open?
BKV: I sort of want that spot to be like Grant Morrison’s guest spot chair in JLA, where any superhero can come in and fill it at any time. I’d sort of like that to be my mini series slot. So I think I will be doing a Spidy thing for Axel Alonso, I don’t want to say too much about it yet. Then after that I’d like to get back to doing some creator owned stuff. I’ve been talking to Wildstorm about one book forever, so I think that’ll get off the ground in the not too distant future. Then we’ll see.
NR: Any other thing you want to mention?
BKV: I think that’s about it. RUNAWAYS, MYSTIQUE, Y: THE LAST MAN, Um…My friend Jay Faerber does a comic book called NOBLE CAUSES and he has, in a couple of months, a one shot coming out that has stories by Geoff Johns and Gail Simone and Me among other people. That was a lot of fun.
NR: Well, thanks a bunch.
BKV: My pleasure.
Nolan Reese is a film student at Boston University and would probably have enough cash saved up to make a film by now if he didn't waste all his money on comics every month.
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