My first interview with Brian K. Vaughan was nearly four years ago. At that time, Vaughan was a respected writer less than one year into the comic book Y: The Last Man. Since then Vaughan has become one of the most popular comic book writers working today with creator owned books such as Y: The Last Man [with artist Pia Guerra] and Ex Machina [with artist Tony Harris. He has had runs on some of the most popular mainstream books like Ultimate X-Men, Mystique and the upcoming Wolverine WWII story with 100 Bullets co-creator Eduardo Risso.
Though at this time, Vaughans smile is beaming because of the release of his new original graphic novel, Pride of Baghdad, lovingly rendered by artist Niko Henrichon. The book is based on the true story of a pride of lions who escape from a Baghdad zoo due the bombings from the Iraq War.
Buy Pride of Baghdad
Daniel Robert Epstein: Are you getting ready to go on your tour?
Brian K. Vaughan: I am just emailing my editors about a little Dr. Strange insert comic thats going to go into the Marvel Studios animated Dr. Strange DVD.
DRE: Thats cool!
BKV: We didnt want to just hack something out because we know more people will read that than our actual book so we really want it to be A+ material. So its a good little story.
DRE: Have you seen anything from the Dr. Strange cartoon movie besides what they showed on that Ultimate Avengers 2 DVD?
BKV: Absolutely nothing. We just started doing our run on Dr. Strange and now we hope people will be interested in that if they dug the movie.
DRE: I havent read your Dr. Strange yet. But from what I read in Wizard, you said you wanted to emphasize more of the doctor than the strange part.
BKV: Definitely, yeah. I think people or at least I felt those characters were impenetrable. The characters were either too cosmic or too far out, but the [Steve] Ditko visuals were beautiful and people loved drawing those trippy dimensions but there really wasnt enough humanity to hook me into it. But I went back and reread those old Ditko/Stan Lee stories and they were really great. I love the origin that they gave the doctor where his accident caused him to lose the fine motor skills in his hands that would let him hold a scalpel. So even though hes a sorcerer supreme and he can cast any spell imaginable, he cant do the one thing he wants to do, which is be a surgeon. That just seemed really tragic, Shakespearian and classic Stan Lee. So I wanted to get back to some of that.
DRE: Just to be a nitpicky fanboy here.
BKV: Sure.
DRE: He fixed his hands years ago. I dont read a lot of the new Marvel Universe stuff so I dont know if theyre in a new world or something now but Im sure he fixed his hands years ago.
BKV: Well if he did that was a disastrous decision and I fully intend to ignore it. That can drive continuity people insane but continuity should help you, not be a burden. I think fixing that is like bringing back Thomas and Martha Wayne in Batman. Like it would make for one cool story if they get to have them there but you defeat what makes your character unique and what drives them. I know Cloak & Dagger lost their powers or swapped them out a while ago and when they showed up in Runaways it just happened to say, Oh yeah, after their adventures in Cleveland everything went back to normal. Cleveland is my default zone. Where if you hate something in the comic or if you feel Im ignoring some important piece of continuity it just sends the characters to Cleveland where they have incredible adventure and they reset everything I like about them.
DRE: An incredible Cleveland adventure.
BKV: Thats it.
DRE: Pride of Baghdad is a beautiful book!
BKV: Thanks.
DRE: Who put you and Niko together?
BKV: It was all Will Dennis, hes my Y: The Last Man editor, so he was the genius behind it.
DRE: Had you known much of Nikos work before?
BKV: Very little. Artists hate drawing animals and cars. So there werent a whole lot of guys who we could look at who had good animal samples. But Niko did a Vertigo graphic novel called Barnum that Howard Chaykin wrote. It happened to have some animals in it so we were like, Well, if hes interested in the subject material lets take a look at some new samples of his. For Pride he reinvented himself and sent in these samples that were just lavish and perfect. We told him we didnt want it to look Disney. That it should look grounded in the natural world but at the same time we wanted them to be just expressive enough that you could tell their emotions. The way that you could tell that your dog was sad or happy on an intuitive level and he just nailed it. He is incredible and Ive never seen anything like it before.
DRE: I have to play devils advocate again. These are animals that act like regular animals but theyre smart for the audiences sake.
BKV: Theyre anthropomorphized. I tried to study as much about lions as possible so that they would behave in ways that lions might but obviously theyre operating on a clearly human level when they talk.
DRE: Ok Im not going to bug you too much about that.
BKV: No, its fine. I know it is weird for some people to make that leap. Growing up I loved books like Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and books like Animal Farm. So I think this can be read on two levels. You can either read it as a straight animal adventure or you can recognize it as an allegory for something much deeper than that.
DRE: How did you first hear of what happened with the lions in Baghdad?
BKV: It was weird. At the time I did want to write a talking animal book just because I wanted to find a genre that would force me to push myself and to try something different because comic books have always done it so well. From Scrooge McDuck to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Maus. Theyve covered the whole spectrum so I wanted to experiment with that. I also wanted to write about Iraq because I was having a lot of conflicted feelings about the impending invasion. Then I read this small news story from an overseas news outlet about the lions and the second I read it, the two ideas instantly melded into one and Pride of Baghdad was born.
DRE: Even though youre using anthropomorphic animals, this is probably the most mature thing youve done. Did this feel like a leap for you?
BKV: Well we were even debating whether or not it would have to run with a mature readers label. This is definitely the work Im most proud of and I definitely pushed myself more on this than anything Ive ever done before. I dont know about mature but maybe complex.
DRE: More complex emotions.
BKV: Yeah. It definitely is operating on a lot of different levels. On one level it is a simple young readers story but I did add a very specific intent with every single character that I wrote but at the same time I didnt want it to be this preachy polemic where Im shoving my beliefs down readers throats. I wanted to invite your interpretation. So it is a tightrope to walk to accomplish both of those things but I loved it. It was hard to write but I really enjoyed writing it.
DRE: I know there were lions in Saddams palaces but were there bears as well?
BKV: There were, shockingly. Saddams sons kept a black bear in their palace. I think a lot of times the stranger, more surreal imagery in the book is the truth. I think some people see it as being put in there for nakedly political reasons like the turtles family drowning in oil. People see that as a commentary about the motives behind starting this war but thats actually true. It happened in the first Gulf War. The oil that was released had a devastating affect on wildlife and the same thing is going on in Lebanon right now.
DRE: The way Niko drew the turtles is gorgeous.
BKV: Nikos character work is just astounding.
DRE: How did you describe the animals to Niko?
BKV: I really didnt describe them too much. It would be like a director giving a line reading to an actor. I feel its better to supply them with dialogue and a good artist will know what the performance should be. So I would more talk about whats going on in their heads. I have a very full script with every line of dialogue there for them. But I wouldnt be too descriptive. I trusted Niko.
DRE: When I spoke to Tony Harris about Ex Machina, he talked about changing the character to be more technologically based.
BKV: Well Im pretty dictatorial by the time Im writing my scripts. But I can write four or five scripts a month but for the artists, thats going to be their life full time. So I want them to be fully invested in it and usually they have better ideas than I do. For Ex Machina, I told Tony it was a story of this mayor who was a retired superhero and I said, He can talk to machines but I picture him as an archetypal iconic superhero with a cape and a mask. Tony was the one who was like, Well look, if he can talk to technology his appearance should reflect that and if were going to be so grounded in the real world it should have this clunky aesthetic to it. It was a brilliant, obvious observation and it made the book 100 times better.
DRE: Its funny that you even said cape to Tony Harris because he doesnt draw superheroes.
BKV: Well Tony can draw anything so Ill make him draw capes someday.
DRE: [laughs] Did you always know you wanted to keep somewhat to the structure of the news report for Pride?
BKV: Oh yeah, definitely. I felt I had some obligation to because if you make up an ending then I think people read into that and try to guess what moral youre trying to impart and I really wasnt doing that. I didnt have one message that I want you to leave with and I think that if you just report, Hey, this is what happened. I think it more invites readers to think about, What is the greater meaning of behind this? So we took a great deal of artistic license with the story but we did feel a responsibility to report the fates of these animals as closely as possible.
DRE: Was it important for you to keep the politics of the book slightly murky?
BKV: No because I feel its there in every single word. But the word political is strange in that people always presume that political means conservative or liberal when talking about the war. I dont know how you can say that when there are a great number of hard right conservatives who are vehemently opposed to the war and there are a great many liberals who got us into this war. I dont know how you can talk about war without being political but I think you can do it without being overtly left or right.
DRE: I saw that youre doing a signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Have you done Barnes & Noble book signings in New York before?
BKV: I havent. Thats surreal. I dont know what theyre expecting of me.
DRE: Especially at this location, youve probably been to that one many times.
BKV: I have, yeah.
DRE: So you know thats the big room too?
BKV: Oh God I hope not.
DRE: Well its the one they use for the people that they expect the most people to show up for.
BKV: Then Ill expect it to be just cavernously empty. I did see Chuck Palahniuk there and its always standing room only. Im sure its going to be two of my college buddies there and then elderly women trapped in the magazine section and theyll feel obligated to just sit and watch me.
DRE: Is it DC or your people that is setting up all the big mainstream press opportunities for you?
BKV: I do not have any people. I barely have myself.
DRE: [laughs] Well you have an agent and a manager at least.
BKV: I have an agent. I dont have a manager or a publicist or a lawyer or any of that nonsense. I have the bare minimum that I need to function.
Its mostly requests from those media outlets who either reach me directly or go through DC. I have to say that DCs marketing, especially this guy David Hyde, has really done a great job. Its been nice and daunting to have DC really have so much faith in this book and to push it so hard but it seems to have delivered on expectations which is nice.
DRE: Im sure youre talking politics with a lot of these mainstream reporters. Are any of them asking about Ex Machina at all?
BKV: Yeah, people seem fairly familiar with my work. So its fun because I think in the world of comics most of my books are these cultish, on the fringe books but in bookstores they seem to be more mainstream than something like Ultimate X-Men or other books Ive worked on in the past. Im always surprised and gratified to hear how many people know about Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina.
DRE: With Y ending and you leaving Runaways, are you leaving behind the toys of your youth?
BKV: No, I dont think its so much that. Its not because Ive come to a point in my life where Im getting rid of comics entirely. Comics will always be first and foremost in my mind. Y is ending because thats where I planned for it to end. Ex Machina has only just reached the halfway point. Runaways is a more complicated situation where Adrian [Alphona] and I both agreed that we hit a high point with that last arc and were worried that if we didnt keep topping ourselves it would be a death sentence for the book. So we felt if we could find someone that they could outdo what we were up to, it would help the book give it a long life. Once Joss Whedon expressed interest in it, it was a done deal. The fact that things seem to be ending all at once is just a coincidence not part of a larger game plan.
DRE: Did someone at Marvel ask you to do a book for them or did you just decide to bring Runaways to them?
BKV: They had said that they were looking for a teenage superhero book and I said Absolutely not because at the time I had just started working on Y. I was really snooty like, This is just going to be the beginning of my arty-fartsy mature readers books. But then I went away and I thought What kind of iconic high concept would someone like Stan Lee do? I thought of this idea that we all at some point in our lives think that our parents are the most evil people in the world, but what if they really were. As soon as I had that, I had to do Runaways and Marvel was really enthusiastic from the second I pitched it.
DRE: If someone like Joss Whedon wasnt coming in would you have had second thoughts?
BKV: We had a long list of guys that I thought could really bring their A game to the book. I knew that we were going to have to hand over the book to someone at some point and I thought we should do it when we had as much momentum as possible. But I made the decision to leave before I ever thought that Joss Whedon was a remote possibility. Marvel had asked me Do you think Joss would be interested? and I told them Dont even bother. I keep telling people its like George Clooney joining the cast of Scrubs. That it makes sense but its also its totally unreasonable and you cant quite wrap your brain around it. I never dreamed that Joss would have interest in it. Hes always been very nice when he talked about the book but its beyond my wildest dreams to have him taking over. Its very cool.
DRE: So Ex Machina is going to end when Mayor Hundreds term in office is over?
BKV: Thats right. It might be his last term; it might just be the end of this first one. But either way its going to cover his first four years in office. So the story will essentially be around 48 issues but well probably round it up to 50 just because 50 is a pretty number.
DRE: Tony [Harris] told me that theres going to be some in-between type stories with some of The Great Machines early adventures?
BKV: Yeah. We did some of that already with that Chris Sprouse two part special. Tony was really adamant that he wanted to draw every single issue of the series which is extremely rare these days. Its awesome to have someone of his caliber that dedicated to the book. But since he does so much its tough for him to put out more than ten issues a year. So sometimes I think we will try and do two special issues that are important to the series but if you want to skip them you can. So every once in a while there will be stories that focus more on his superhero past since the series proper is really more about his political present.
DRE: How are you handling all of your success?
BKV: Well since I am pretty self-loathing and self-critical, I just try and dwell on the people who dont like me and be sad and alone in my room. I realize that on the surface most of my ideas sound profoundly idiotic. Theres a guy and his monkey being chased by single breasted women on motorcycles, a dude with a jet pack who stopped one of the planes on 9/11 and talking animals in Iraq. They sound offensive so I cant ever imagine that anyone will have any interest in them other than me. But I have always written the stories that I would like to read. Obviously its lovely that other people are interested in the stories but I try not to dwell on their opinions too much because I dont want them to second guess me.
DRE: Ampersand seems like hes a lot of fun to write.
BKV: Hes a monkey. How can you go wrong?
DRE: The look of joy on Ampersands face when he escapes from the smugglers makes me laugh every time I look at it [laughs].
BKV: Thank you, that panel was spectacular. You cant beat writing a monkey.
DRE: How difficult has it been to mature Yorick over the years?
BKV: It really is organic. Im 30 now so I was probably 25 when I pitched it. At the time I was looking back at myself having just left college. I dont think youre ever a bigger douchebag in life than you are right as you leave college because you leave thinking that you know everything when in actuality you know nothing. So youre at your most nave and your most self-righteous at the same time. I think you become a man on the journey afterwards. So I was familiar with my own journey and I think Im probably still a bigger douchebag than Yorick has become over the years. I knew it would be hard because hes not necessarily a likeable protagonist at the beginning. I just hope hed always be interesting.
DRE: The idea of him being suicidal, which was something taken care of by Agent 7-11, was that just something you just noticed he seemed to keep doing or was that something you knew you were going to do?
BKV: I think it was something I knew that I wanted to do. I thought from the very beginning it would be so obvious thats what he was trying to do. It was interesting because it seemed most people just thought, Oh hes so unbelievably reckless. Why would he throw himself into these circumstances? Its one of those situations where you forget that you know your characters better than anyone else does. In my mind, thats what I would do instantly if all of the men died. Not because I hate the thought of being left alone with women. Just because the burden of being the last of your kind and that responsibility being thrust on someone who detests responsibility, so your first instinct would be to run from it even if that means throwing yourself off the bridge. So that was there from the beginning.
DRE: So when Y ends the only regular series youll be doing at that point is Machina.
BKV: Yeah. Dr. Strange is just a miniseries.
I definitely I dont want to overextend myself now because I feel an obligation to end Y as strongly as we started. So Im trying to pour as much energy as possible into that. Same with Runaways as well, but when Y ends thats when Im really going to sit down and think hard about what to do next. I would love to do something else with Niko and hopefully another graphic novel. Ill probably take a little breather from a long form serialized book like Y, but I would definitely like to do another one. Once Dr. Strange wraps thats probably the end of me doing other peoples characters. Not because Im too big a snob. I love them, I just really think Im probably best at writing characters that I help to create. If Im lucky enough to put them out in a crowded marketplace and still have them sell well enough to justify their existence then Im going to keep at it. I just really like to keep making new things.
DRE: You did an interview with Devin Faraci from CHUD.com not too long ago. He told me that you said that Ultimate X-Men might not be the right book for someone thats been reading X-Men for 25 years.
BKV: Yeah, I think its hard because when youre writing Ultimate X-Men, the goal is to write an accessible X-Men story for people who might only know the X-Men from the cartoon or the movie or something. I think people who have been reading X-Men for 40 years get frustrated if they see stories that theyve already seen once. They also get frustrated if they see characters who are radically different from the ones that they like. So its hard, probably because the vast majority of the people who are reading Ultimate X-Men are the people who are also picking up Uncanny X-Men and the regular X-Men books. I always saw the goal as lets reach out and build a new audience for people that dont already love X-Men.
DRE: I dont read any of the X-books on a regular basis. Is there an X-Men for someone thats read 40 years of X-Men?
BKV: I think Joss Whedon has pretty much hit the nail on the head in that hes doing a book thats accessible to people who love Buffy and will just follow him anywhere and havent read X-Men before. I guess Im an X-Men nerd. Ive been reading it for a long time and I find that book just incredibly vibrant and fresh and its everything that you love about these characters in a whole new light. Do you read The Astonishing X-Men at all?
DRE: I read the first two arcs. They were pretty good. Was the second arc the one where we find out the Danger Room is alive?
BKV: Uh-huh.
DRE: That just didnt seem like something Professor Xavier would do. To kidnap some alien or whatever he did. Though [John] Cassadays art is beautiful.
BKV: Well, if youre at the point where youre saying it doesnt seem like something Professor Xavier would do youre already too big of an X-Men fan even though you say youre not.
DRE: [laughs] I mean if hes not in a yellow jumpsuit, but I dont care.
BKV: Yeah, well, there you go.
DRE: Any movement on the Y movie?
BKV: I just wrote a screenplay for Y: the Last Man. New Line was nice enough to let me take a crack at it. Everyone at New Line seems to love it so based on that Im writing the Ex Machina script for New Line as well. But you know how movies work so theres no guarantee that theyre going to get made any time soon, if at all. But theyre both on a surprisingly good track right now.
DRE: Can you tell me if theres World Trade Center stuff in your Ex Machina script?
BKV: No, I cant tell you any specifics about either of the movies Im afraid.
DRE: Alright.
BKV: But its a valid question.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Though at this time, Vaughans smile is beaming because of the release of his new original graphic novel, Pride of Baghdad, lovingly rendered by artist Niko Henrichon. The book is based on the true story of a pride of lions who escape from a Baghdad zoo due the bombings from the Iraq War.
Buy Pride of Baghdad
Daniel Robert Epstein: Are you getting ready to go on your tour?
Brian K. Vaughan: I am just emailing my editors about a little Dr. Strange insert comic thats going to go into the Marvel Studios animated Dr. Strange DVD.
DRE: Thats cool!
BKV: We didnt want to just hack something out because we know more people will read that than our actual book so we really want it to be A+ material. So its a good little story.
DRE: Have you seen anything from the Dr. Strange cartoon movie besides what they showed on that Ultimate Avengers 2 DVD?
BKV: Absolutely nothing. We just started doing our run on Dr. Strange and now we hope people will be interested in that if they dug the movie.
DRE: I havent read your Dr. Strange yet. But from what I read in Wizard, you said you wanted to emphasize more of the doctor than the strange part.
BKV: Definitely, yeah. I think people or at least I felt those characters were impenetrable. The characters were either too cosmic or too far out, but the [Steve] Ditko visuals were beautiful and people loved drawing those trippy dimensions but there really wasnt enough humanity to hook me into it. But I went back and reread those old Ditko/Stan Lee stories and they were really great. I love the origin that they gave the doctor where his accident caused him to lose the fine motor skills in his hands that would let him hold a scalpel. So even though hes a sorcerer supreme and he can cast any spell imaginable, he cant do the one thing he wants to do, which is be a surgeon. That just seemed really tragic, Shakespearian and classic Stan Lee. So I wanted to get back to some of that.
DRE: Just to be a nitpicky fanboy here.
BKV: Sure.
DRE: He fixed his hands years ago. I dont read a lot of the new Marvel Universe stuff so I dont know if theyre in a new world or something now but Im sure he fixed his hands years ago.
BKV: Well if he did that was a disastrous decision and I fully intend to ignore it. That can drive continuity people insane but continuity should help you, not be a burden. I think fixing that is like bringing back Thomas and Martha Wayne in Batman. Like it would make for one cool story if they get to have them there but you defeat what makes your character unique and what drives them. I know Cloak & Dagger lost their powers or swapped them out a while ago and when they showed up in Runaways it just happened to say, Oh yeah, after their adventures in Cleveland everything went back to normal. Cleveland is my default zone. Where if you hate something in the comic or if you feel Im ignoring some important piece of continuity it just sends the characters to Cleveland where they have incredible adventure and they reset everything I like about them.
DRE: An incredible Cleveland adventure.
BKV: Thats it.
DRE: Pride of Baghdad is a beautiful book!
BKV: Thanks.
DRE: Who put you and Niko together?
BKV: It was all Will Dennis, hes my Y: The Last Man editor, so he was the genius behind it.
DRE: Had you known much of Nikos work before?
BKV: Very little. Artists hate drawing animals and cars. So there werent a whole lot of guys who we could look at who had good animal samples. But Niko did a Vertigo graphic novel called Barnum that Howard Chaykin wrote. It happened to have some animals in it so we were like, Well, if hes interested in the subject material lets take a look at some new samples of his. For Pride he reinvented himself and sent in these samples that were just lavish and perfect. We told him we didnt want it to look Disney. That it should look grounded in the natural world but at the same time we wanted them to be just expressive enough that you could tell their emotions. The way that you could tell that your dog was sad or happy on an intuitive level and he just nailed it. He is incredible and Ive never seen anything like it before.
DRE: I have to play devils advocate again. These are animals that act like regular animals but theyre smart for the audiences sake.
BKV: Theyre anthropomorphized. I tried to study as much about lions as possible so that they would behave in ways that lions might but obviously theyre operating on a clearly human level when they talk.
DRE: Ok Im not going to bug you too much about that.
BKV: No, its fine. I know it is weird for some people to make that leap. Growing up I loved books like Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and books like Animal Farm. So I think this can be read on two levels. You can either read it as a straight animal adventure or you can recognize it as an allegory for something much deeper than that.
DRE: How did you first hear of what happened with the lions in Baghdad?
BKV: It was weird. At the time I did want to write a talking animal book just because I wanted to find a genre that would force me to push myself and to try something different because comic books have always done it so well. From Scrooge McDuck to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Maus. Theyve covered the whole spectrum so I wanted to experiment with that. I also wanted to write about Iraq because I was having a lot of conflicted feelings about the impending invasion. Then I read this small news story from an overseas news outlet about the lions and the second I read it, the two ideas instantly melded into one and Pride of Baghdad was born.
DRE: Even though youre using anthropomorphic animals, this is probably the most mature thing youve done. Did this feel like a leap for you?
BKV: Well we were even debating whether or not it would have to run with a mature readers label. This is definitely the work Im most proud of and I definitely pushed myself more on this than anything Ive ever done before. I dont know about mature but maybe complex.
DRE: More complex emotions.
BKV: Yeah. It definitely is operating on a lot of different levels. On one level it is a simple young readers story but I did add a very specific intent with every single character that I wrote but at the same time I didnt want it to be this preachy polemic where Im shoving my beliefs down readers throats. I wanted to invite your interpretation. So it is a tightrope to walk to accomplish both of those things but I loved it. It was hard to write but I really enjoyed writing it.
DRE: I know there were lions in Saddams palaces but were there bears as well?
BKV: There were, shockingly. Saddams sons kept a black bear in their palace. I think a lot of times the stranger, more surreal imagery in the book is the truth. I think some people see it as being put in there for nakedly political reasons like the turtles family drowning in oil. People see that as a commentary about the motives behind starting this war but thats actually true. It happened in the first Gulf War. The oil that was released had a devastating affect on wildlife and the same thing is going on in Lebanon right now.
DRE: The way Niko drew the turtles is gorgeous.
BKV: Nikos character work is just astounding.
DRE: How did you describe the animals to Niko?
BKV: I really didnt describe them too much. It would be like a director giving a line reading to an actor. I feel its better to supply them with dialogue and a good artist will know what the performance should be. So I would more talk about whats going on in their heads. I have a very full script with every line of dialogue there for them. But I wouldnt be too descriptive. I trusted Niko.
DRE: When I spoke to Tony Harris about Ex Machina, he talked about changing the character to be more technologically based.
BKV: Well Im pretty dictatorial by the time Im writing my scripts. But I can write four or five scripts a month but for the artists, thats going to be their life full time. So I want them to be fully invested in it and usually they have better ideas than I do. For Ex Machina, I told Tony it was a story of this mayor who was a retired superhero and I said, He can talk to machines but I picture him as an archetypal iconic superhero with a cape and a mask. Tony was the one who was like, Well look, if he can talk to technology his appearance should reflect that and if were going to be so grounded in the real world it should have this clunky aesthetic to it. It was a brilliant, obvious observation and it made the book 100 times better.
DRE: Its funny that you even said cape to Tony Harris because he doesnt draw superheroes.
BKV: Well Tony can draw anything so Ill make him draw capes someday.
DRE: [laughs] Did you always know you wanted to keep somewhat to the structure of the news report for Pride?
BKV: Oh yeah, definitely. I felt I had some obligation to because if you make up an ending then I think people read into that and try to guess what moral youre trying to impart and I really wasnt doing that. I didnt have one message that I want you to leave with and I think that if you just report, Hey, this is what happened. I think it more invites readers to think about, What is the greater meaning of behind this? So we took a great deal of artistic license with the story but we did feel a responsibility to report the fates of these animals as closely as possible.
DRE: Was it important for you to keep the politics of the book slightly murky?
BKV: No because I feel its there in every single word. But the word political is strange in that people always presume that political means conservative or liberal when talking about the war. I dont know how you can say that when there are a great number of hard right conservatives who are vehemently opposed to the war and there are a great many liberals who got us into this war. I dont know how you can talk about war without being political but I think you can do it without being overtly left or right.
DRE: I saw that youre doing a signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Have you done Barnes & Noble book signings in New York before?
BKV: I havent. Thats surreal. I dont know what theyre expecting of me.
DRE: Especially at this location, youve probably been to that one many times.
BKV: I have, yeah.
DRE: So you know thats the big room too?
BKV: Oh God I hope not.
DRE: Well its the one they use for the people that they expect the most people to show up for.
BKV: Then Ill expect it to be just cavernously empty. I did see Chuck Palahniuk there and its always standing room only. Im sure its going to be two of my college buddies there and then elderly women trapped in the magazine section and theyll feel obligated to just sit and watch me.
DRE: Is it DC or your people that is setting up all the big mainstream press opportunities for you?
BKV: I do not have any people. I barely have myself.
DRE: [laughs] Well you have an agent and a manager at least.
BKV: I have an agent. I dont have a manager or a publicist or a lawyer or any of that nonsense. I have the bare minimum that I need to function.
Its mostly requests from those media outlets who either reach me directly or go through DC. I have to say that DCs marketing, especially this guy David Hyde, has really done a great job. Its been nice and daunting to have DC really have so much faith in this book and to push it so hard but it seems to have delivered on expectations which is nice.
DRE: Im sure youre talking politics with a lot of these mainstream reporters. Are any of them asking about Ex Machina at all?
BKV: Yeah, people seem fairly familiar with my work. So its fun because I think in the world of comics most of my books are these cultish, on the fringe books but in bookstores they seem to be more mainstream than something like Ultimate X-Men or other books Ive worked on in the past. Im always surprised and gratified to hear how many people know about Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina.
DRE: With Y ending and you leaving Runaways, are you leaving behind the toys of your youth?
BKV: No, I dont think its so much that. Its not because Ive come to a point in my life where Im getting rid of comics entirely. Comics will always be first and foremost in my mind. Y is ending because thats where I planned for it to end. Ex Machina has only just reached the halfway point. Runaways is a more complicated situation where Adrian [Alphona] and I both agreed that we hit a high point with that last arc and were worried that if we didnt keep topping ourselves it would be a death sentence for the book. So we felt if we could find someone that they could outdo what we were up to, it would help the book give it a long life. Once Joss Whedon expressed interest in it, it was a done deal. The fact that things seem to be ending all at once is just a coincidence not part of a larger game plan.
DRE: Did someone at Marvel ask you to do a book for them or did you just decide to bring Runaways to them?
BKV: They had said that they were looking for a teenage superhero book and I said Absolutely not because at the time I had just started working on Y. I was really snooty like, This is just going to be the beginning of my arty-fartsy mature readers books. But then I went away and I thought What kind of iconic high concept would someone like Stan Lee do? I thought of this idea that we all at some point in our lives think that our parents are the most evil people in the world, but what if they really were. As soon as I had that, I had to do Runaways and Marvel was really enthusiastic from the second I pitched it.
DRE: If someone like Joss Whedon wasnt coming in would you have had second thoughts?
BKV: We had a long list of guys that I thought could really bring their A game to the book. I knew that we were going to have to hand over the book to someone at some point and I thought we should do it when we had as much momentum as possible. But I made the decision to leave before I ever thought that Joss Whedon was a remote possibility. Marvel had asked me Do you think Joss would be interested? and I told them Dont even bother. I keep telling people its like George Clooney joining the cast of Scrubs. That it makes sense but its also its totally unreasonable and you cant quite wrap your brain around it. I never dreamed that Joss would have interest in it. Hes always been very nice when he talked about the book but its beyond my wildest dreams to have him taking over. Its very cool.
DRE: So Ex Machina is going to end when Mayor Hundreds term in office is over?
BKV: Thats right. It might be his last term; it might just be the end of this first one. But either way its going to cover his first four years in office. So the story will essentially be around 48 issues but well probably round it up to 50 just because 50 is a pretty number.
DRE: Tony [Harris] told me that theres going to be some in-between type stories with some of The Great Machines early adventures?
BKV: Yeah. We did some of that already with that Chris Sprouse two part special. Tony was really adamant that he wanted to draw every single issue of the series which is extremely rare these days. Its awesome to have someone of his caliber that dedicated to the book. But since he does so much its tough for him to put out more than ten issues a year. So sometimes I think we will try and do two special issues that are important to the series but if you want to skip them you can. So every once in a while there will be stories that focus more on his superhero past since the series proper is really more about his political present.
DRE: How are you handling all of your success?
BKV: Well since I am pretty self-loathing and self-critical, I just try and dwell on the people who dont like me and be sad and alone in my room. I realize that on the surface most of my ideas sound profoundly idiotic. Theres a guy and his monkey being chased by single breasted women on motorcycles, a dude with a jet pack who stopped one of the planes on 9/11 and talking animals in Iraq. They sound offensive so I cant ever imagine that anyone will have any interest in them other than me. But I have always written the stories that I would like to read. Obviously its lovely that other people are interested in the stories but I try not to dwell on their opinions too much because I dont want them to second guess me.
DRE: Ampersand seems like hes a lot of fun to write.
BKV: Hes a monkey. How can you go wrong?
DRE: The look of joy on Ampersands face when he escapes from the smugglers makes me laugh every time I look at it [laughs].
BKV: Thank you, that panel was spectacular. You cant beat writing a monkey.
DRE: How difficult has it been to mature Yorick over the years?
BKV: It really is organic. Im 30 now so I was probably 25 when I pitched it. At the time I was looking back at myself having just left college. I dont think youre ever a bigger douchebag in life than you are right as you leave college because you leave thinking that you know everything when in actuality you know nothing. So youre at your most nave and your most self-righteous at the same time. I think you become a man on the journey afterwards. So I was familiar with my own journey and I think Im probably still a bigger douchebag than Yorick has become over the years. I knew it would be hard because hes not necessarily a likeable protagonist at the beginning. I just hope hed always be interesting.
DRE: The idea of him being suicidal, which was something taken care of by Agent 7-11, was that just something you just noticed he seemed to keep doing or was that something you knew you were going to do?
BKV: I think it was something I knew that I wanted to do. I thought from the very beginning it would be so obvious thats what he was trying to do. It was interesting because it seemed most people just thought, Oh hes so unbelievably reckless. Why would he throw himself into these circumstances? Its one of those situations where you forget that you know your characters better than anyone else does. In my mind, thats what I would do instantly if all of the men died. Not because I hate the thought of being left alone with women. Just because the burden of being the last of your kind and that responsibility being thrust on someone who detests responsibility, so your first instinct would be to run from it even if that means throwing yourself off the bridge. So that was there from the beginning.
DRE: So when Y ends the only regular series youll be doing at that point is Machina.
BKV: Yeah. Dr. Strange is just a miniseries.
I definitely I dont want to overextend myself now because I feel an obligation to end Y as strongly as we started. So Im trying to pour as much energy as possible into that. Same with Runaways as well, but when Y ends thats when Im really going to sit down and think hard about what to do next. I would love to do something else with Niko and hopefully another graphic novel. Ill probably take a little breather from a long form serialized book like Y, but I would definitely like to do another one. Once Dr. Strange wraps thats probably the end of me doing other peoples characters. Not because Im too big a snob. I love them, I just really think Im probably best at writing characters that I help to create. If Im lucky enough to put them out in a crowded marketplace and still have them sell well enough to justify their existence then Im going to keep at it. I just really like to keep making new things.
DRE: You did an interview with Devin Faraci from CHUD.com not too long ago. He told me that you said that Ultimate X-Men might not be the right book for someone thats been reading X-Men for 25 years.
BKV: Yeah, I think its hard because when youre writing Ultimate X-Men, the goal is to write an accessible X-Men story for people who might only know the X-Men from the cartoon or the movie or something. I think people who have been reading X-Men for 40 years get frustrated if they see stories that theyve already seen once. They also get frustrated if they see characters who are radically different from the ones that they like. So its hard, probably because the vast majority of the people who are reading Ultimate X-Men are the people who are also picking up Uncanny X-Men and the regular X-Men books. I always saw the goal as lets reach out and build a new audience for people that dont already love X-Men.
DRE: I dont read any of the X-books on a regular basis. Is there an X-Men for someone thats read 40 years of X-Men?
BKV: I think Joss Whedon has pretty much hit the nail on the head in that hes doing a book thats accessible to people who love Buffy and will just follow him anywhere and havent read X-Men before. I guess Im an X-Men nerd. Ive been reading it for a long time and I find that book just incredibly vibrant and fresh and its everything that you love about these characters in a whole new light. Do you read The Astonishing X-Men at all?
DRE: I read the first two arcs. They were pretty good. Was the second arc the one where we find out the Danger Room is alive?
BKV: Uh-huh.
DRE: That just didnt seem like something Professor Xavier would do. To kidnap some alien or whatever he did. Though [John] Cassadays art is beautiful.
BKV: Well, if youre at the point where youre saying it doesnt seem like something Professor Xavier would do youre already too big of an X-Men fan even though you say youre not.
DRE: [laughs] I mean if hes not in a yellow jumpsuit, but I dont care.
BKV: Yeah, well, there you go.
DRE: Any movement on the Y movie?
BKV: I just wrote a screenplay for Y: the Last Man. New Line was nice enough to let me take a crack at it. Everyone at New Line seems to love it so based on that Im writing the Ex Machina script for New Line as well. But you know how movies work so theres no guarantee that theyre going to get made any time soon, if at all. But theyre both on a surprisingly good track right now.
DRE: Can you tell me if theres World Trade Center stuff in your Ex Machina script?
BKV: No, I cant tell you any specifics about either of the movies Im afraid.
DRE: Alright.
BKV: But its a valid question.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Just prepare yourself if you like giraffes before you read it.
I don't know if I'd still be reading comics today if it weren't for you. You're one of the best writers working.
<3 M_D
PS yeah, Pride of Baghdad was amazing.