AVC: Because you're a hardcore Republican, obviously.
BKV: [Laughs.] Well, I never talk about it, but I think if you read all of my books, you can probably suss out where my politics are.
AVC: With Ultimate X-Men and Runaways, you deal with a lot of teen characters. Do you have a process for getting inside the heads of teens?
BKV: I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I don't have to... I remember reading an interview with [Brian Michael] Bendis where he talks about going to the mall and listening to kids, and that just sounds sort of creepy, like a pedophile thing, to me. I don't do that. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than we do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.
AVC: You've had some interesting jobs prior to comics, including a stint working at a psychiatric hospital. How long were you there, and what did you do?
BKV: It was my second job after film school. I saw a posting in the NYU job bulletin—they were looking for someone in an audiovisual capacity, so I went and applied for the job. I was sort of the glorified A.V. nerd, wheeling TV trays in and out of places. But every once in a while, I would shoot video stuff where the psychiatric interns would interview patients and they'd want someone to tape it. I'd get to do that. Or I'd have really strange things, like a guy would come into the hospital with, I guess, amnesia... I don't know if there's a better term, a more scientific term, for that, but they would do sodium pentothal, the Nazi truth-serum drug you always hear about in fiction. They'd inject that in order to force memory stuff. I got to tape things like that. And I mean, talk about grist for the mill. As a writer, you want to see stuff like that. I would get to document in some way what was going on at this hospital. I was there for, I guess, about a year and a half, two years.
AVC: Which turns up in your writing more, that or your job as a live-in dog-sitter?
BKV: The live-in dog-butler thing that I did was just a crazy... Some lady let me stay in her butler quarters. I was so poor and I didn't have enough comics work, so I got to live in a Central Park West butler's quarters, and I took care of a rich person's dog.
AVC: Do you have a dog now?
BKV: I do not, and because of that experience, I probably never will. It was a big dog, too, an inappropriately big dog for New York.
AVC: Does your writing read better in trade-paperback form, or month to month?
BKV: I don't know. I sort of read or experience it month to month, and that's what I love. I know a lot of guys—there's this debate about "Are you writing for the trade or not?" But I really don't. I love serialized fiction. I love especially Y, where Yorick is sort of aging in real time. We're entering year three, and Yorick is three years older than he was at the beginning. I like that experience of visiting the characters, sort of peeking in at them once a month. Hopefully, it reads well in trades, because I think that's where most people discover my work. But I like the cliffhangers. I like punishing people and being mean and ending on the best cliffhanger possible.
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