When Brian K. Vaughan was a child, he thought that comic books could be cut up, rearranged and turned into new stories. “From the first comic book I read, I wanted to get into it and start ripping it apart,” he recalls inside Meltdown right before the release party for his latest series, Saga.
It’s no wonder that Vaughan eventually started writing comic books. The Eisner-winning author has a host of credits under his belt, including Runaways, Ex Machina, Pride of Baghdad and Y: The Last Man. He’s written for scores of other series too, like X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight. On top of that, Vaughan is a TV writer who worked on Lost. Currently he’s writing the pilot for Under the Dome, a Stephen King novel that Dreamworks is adapting into a Showtime series. “[King] likes what I’ve done so far, so I can die a happy man,” he says.
Vaughan appears relatively unassuming inside Meltdown. He shaves his head and was wearing a black button-down shirt when we met, not too different from others inside the store. He’s also humble. He refers to himself as “Forrest Gump-ing” his way across the entertainment landscape, from film school to comic books to television.
Vaughan, who grew up in Cleveland, was a film student at NYU when he took part in Marvel’s Stan-Hattan Project. Through that, he got his first gig, writing dialog for X-Men offshoot Cable. He was a college junior at the time. He credits getting the job to “proximity”– his NYU dorm was near Marvel’s office. In the days before everyone was online, that made a difference for rush work.
Comic books was a welcome respite for the film student. “Every student movie was sort of a failed science experiment,” he says, “whereas with comics, I could do whatever I wanted.”
Vaughan learned a lot from working on superhero comics, but says he had difficulty writing for characters that were so deeply embedded in pop culture. As a kid, he was a fan of icons like Spider-Man and Batman, but his perspective on comics had changed after he read Watchmen. “I don’t want to follow characters around, I want to follow this writer,” he says of his reaction to Alan Moore’s now classic story. After that Vaughan gravitated towards titles like Peter Bagge’s Hate and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball. Later, as an adult working in the comic book industry, he was ready to do something on his own as well.
That chance came after a slight mishap. Vaughan was trying to break into the Vertigo world for a while with no luck.
“It was almost like having a couple Marvel projects under your belt hurt you more than it helped you,” he says. “I didn’t have any cred because I was just another lousy superhero writer.”
Eventually, he found a way inside the imprint. “I got a job writing Swamp Thing for Vertigo and did just a terrible job on that and got that book canceled,” he says. It’s a strange start for sure, but the relationship didn’t end there. Editor extraordinaire Karen Berger asked him to start pitching ideas and Y: The Last Man came into being. It won awards and was optioned for a film. And if you saw Tuesday night’s broadcast of Damon Lindelof’s conversation with Vaughan at Meltdown, then you know that Y was an influence on the Lost co-creator as well.
Vaughan impressed others in the industry too. Thanks to some encouragement from Joss Whedon, he ended up in Los Angeles, where his agent who found out that Lost was in need of a writer. Soon, he had a new job.
“I thought that writing for one visual medium would prepare me for the other, but they’re very different,” he says.
“Writing for television is sort of like a low stakes version of being a presidential speech writer,” he adds. “It’s not your job to come up with policy. It’s your job to sort of help the voice of the administration.”
Vaughan learned the T.V. game on the job. He says that people were nice, but there was still the sense that he was the new kid, not just to the show but to the industry. There was a lot of guidance from showrunners Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, though, and his work with Lost went well. “My contributions tended to be small, but I hope, helpful,” he says.Despite his T.V. success, Vaughan never strayed far from comics. He was actually writing five books when he started working on Lost and continued with Ex Machina until its conclusion in 2010. He began fleshing out Saga with artist Fiona Staples not long after that with the hope that it will be his longest running series yet.
“This is in my blood,” he says of comic books. “This is what I like doing most.”