Writer returns to the love of his life with new ‘Saga’
And brings a love story to intergalactic epic
Brian K. Vaughan was a writer on Lost, and now he’s found a new Saga.
After creating the acclaimed comic-book series Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina in the 2000s, the scribe shifted his focus to film and TV, joining the hit TV series Lost for three seasons. With Saga, an Image Comics series making its debut in March, he’s returning to the industry where he first made his mark.
“Comics are in my blood. I’ve been dying to get back to it,” Vaughan says.
Admittedly a “big Star Wars nerd,” Vaughan has channeled his inner George Lucas to create a sci-fi/fantasy epic. It follows two soldiers — a ram-horned man named Marko and a winged female warrior named Alana — from different sides of an intergalactic war who fall in love and decide to have a baby.
That’s when the real adventure begins, as the new family is
“I just miss the days from when I was a kid where you could pick up a No. 1 comic and it’s not a reboot or a relaunch or something.”
pursued by everyone in the universe, Vaughan says. “You’ll get a nice mixture of some bounty hunters, monsters and all sorts of lovely threats.”
That’s all he’s saying for now because he wants to keep some surprises for the fans who have been clamoring for a comic from him for four years.
“I just miss the days from when I was a kid where you could pick up a No. 1 comic and it’s not a reboot or a relaunch or something,” says Vaughan. “It was just wall-to-wall new.”
It’s also a universe that he has been imagining since he was a kid. But it wasn’t until he had his own children that the story of Saga came to life.
“There are a lot of stories about having children, but they’re always comedies,” says Vaughan, 35, father to 1-yearold Alec and 8-month-old Wilhelmina. “It’s like the birth of a child is the end of drama. But I don’t think that’s true.”
Saga artist Fiona Staples became a fan of Vaughan’s after she read his Y: The Last Man series and has infused their shared outer-space universe with locales designed after various regions of Earth or certain historical periods, such as robots in Edwardian military costumes and trains that look like Chinese dragons.
“Brian’s stories have a broader scope than many writers attempt,” Staples says. “They’re detailed, thematically rich, and yet they’re accessible to new readers as well as longtime comic fans.”
Image publisher Eric Stephenson also was a big fan, and he and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman have been trying to lure Vaughan to the company for years.
“He’s one of the best writers the medium has ever seen, and I’d say that’s primarily because of how ‘real’ his characters are,”
— Brian K. Vaughan
Stephenson says. “Brian brings his characters to life in a way that makes them part of his readers’ lives. It’s what every writer wants to achieve.”
Vaughan says he owes Lost executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse a lot for taking a chance on him, and he is not done with what he calls his “cushy Hollywood gig.”
He’s writing the pilot for Showtime’s TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel Under the Dome, and he has movies of his own comics in various stages of development.
The process has been slow, he says. “I have learned you don’t count your chickens until you see a teaser poster, at least.”
Vaughan never regretted his move to the screen, but his adventures there and working with Staples on Saga have only made him adore comics more.
“Writing three or four monthly books, you start to take comics for granted, and having left for a little bit, I now realize what I love so much about them,” says Vaughan.
“Whatever we want to do, we don’t get any notes or feedback. It’s just unfiltered creativity from artist to the audience. It’s the best.”