BKV interview

IGN.com has launched a comic section and for their first interview they hit up Brian K. Vaughan. There's lots of good stuff in here, so let's just jump in:

BKV: With Y more so than Ex Machina. Y is almost planned out beat-for-beat 'til the end. It's 60 issues it's going to last, so that'll be five years. I knew first going into it, pretty concretely, the beginning, middle and the end and given myself enough leeway that if I come up with a sort of fun idea in the middle or if I change my mind about something, I can veer. But I haven't done that too much.

Ex Machina is not quite that planned out, but it's going to be four years. It's going to cover Mitchell Hundred, the mayor, his first and maybe last four years of office. I know how it ends, but because it takes place a couple of years in the past, I wanted to be open enough that the book will still be going on I guess when they hit this time in 2005. So if something major happens in New York this year, I'll be able to write about that when our story catches up with the present day. But for the most part, yeah, I know how it begins, I know the middle and how it ends, [but] with the freedom to diverge from this roadmap if I want to.

I've always wondered about this, how planned out books like these are by the authors. Good to know there's no set way of doing it.

BKV had this to say in response to a question regarding Ultimate Longshot:

I wanted to take characters who maybe didn't fire on all cylinders the first time around, like Mr. Sinister, and try looking at them from an entirely different angle. Almost like doing a remix of a song or a cover version.With Longshot, I'm like you, I loved that mini-series. But Longshot, initially, wasn't intended to be an X-Men character, even though that's what he became. So I sort of approached it as, what if he was a mutant from the get-go and try to incorporate him maybe more organically into the X-Men universe.

Longshot doesn't make sense in the Marvel U? Hehe, anyway:

IGN: Do you have a desire to do a long Peter David or John Byrne-type run where you are on a title for 10 years and can plan out and control everything?

BKV: No. Not so much so. And I know that puts me in the minority. I love superheroes, I'm not a genre snob -- I grew up on superheroes and it's been an honor to get a chance to write almost all of them at this point in the DC [and] Marvel universes. In the long-term I'm more interested in creating my own thing or co-creating with artists, stuff like Runaways or Ex Machina or Y. New is what gets me off.

We'd all be f----- if Stan Lee had come into comics and said, "Oh boy, I've got this Superman story I'm aching to tell." He didn't do that. He really came in and wanted to create new things and built this House of Ideas. I think we do need great creators like Bendis to nurture those characters and be the caretakers and keep them alive and vibrant for a new generation. I think companies also need guys who want to come in and keep stirring new stuff into the pot and that's certainly more my wheelhouse.