Born in Cleveland and educated at NYU's film school, Brian K. Vaughan has been kicking around in comics since the late '90s, but over the past few years, he's emerged as one of the field's dominant voices for readers who value well-developed characters, thought-provoking plots, and social commentary. In 2002, he teamed with artist Pia Guerra and DC Comics offshoot Vertigo to launch Y: The Last Man, the story of a semi-employed magician who, along with his pet monkey, inexplicably survives a cataclysm that wipes out all the males on earth. What sounds like the basis for a dirty joke has proven, at 35 issues and counting, to be a consistently gripping, often wry, occasionally devastating examination of gender roles and the frayed ends of the ties that keep civilization together.
Vaughan's other series include Runaways, about a group of teens who flee home when they learn their parents are supervillains; it shares space on the Marvel shelves with Vaughan's ongoing run on Ultimate X-Men. And last year, Vaughan and artist Tony Harris unveiled a new title, Ex Machina, a depiction of post-9/11 New York politics with a twist: In the wake of the attacks, a well-intentioned, pragmatic, occasionally inscrutable former superhero has become the mayor.
Vaughan's future plans include an ongoing story in Michael Chabon's quarterly Amazing Adventures Of The Escapist comics anthology, and a new graphic novel, Pride Of Baghdad, about zoo lions let loose in Baghdad after an American bombing. At the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, the afternoon before Vaughan won the Best Writer Eisner Award and Ex Machina won for best new series, Vaughan spoke to The A.V. Club about dog-sitting, comics he got canceled, and getting into the mind of teenagers.
The A.V. Club: You went to film school. How deep do your scripts get into dictating visual details?
Brian K. Vaughan: They used to be a lot more visual, but the longer I've been writing, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning. But you know, they are such completely different things, film and comics. In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that. So really, it's just about that economy, distilling it down to this very specific image. You'd have to talk to my artists—I think they probably all would say I'm too talky and my books are too much people going back and forth. I have no idea. There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.
AVC: How difficult was the pitch for Y: The Last Man?
BKV: It was sort of hard, because I'd just tanked the Swamp Thing franchise for Vertigo.
AVC: Did it get cancelled after your run?
BKV: It got cancelled during my run. I sort of ran it into the ground. You know, I was in my early 20s when I got that gig, but to Vertigo's credit, Karen Berger, the editor-in-chief, and Heidi MacDonald, who was the editor, they were really nice and said, "We really like your voice, but it seems like you'd be better suited for your own creation rather than trying to write existing characters." So after that, it wasn't too hard, even though the high concept sounds so dumb, you know, the last man and women riding motorcycles, and monkeys... It just sounds ridiculous. But I wrote such a detailed bible to convince them that it was going to be a thoughtful story about gender and not just a bad Cinemax late-night movie that they were really pretty supportive from day one.
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