Last week, DC Comics published the final issue of Y the Last Man, wrapping up writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra's 60-issue Vertigo series about the aftermath of a plague that instantly killed all males on Earth except for a young escape artist and his pet monkey. Over the past five years, Ythe Last Man has slowly and steadily gained readers—mostly through its trade paperback collections—and director D.J. Caruso is now working on a film adaptation. Preparing for the upcoming $100-a-ticket “wrap party” for the series (it’s also a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on February 8, Vaughan looked back on the evolution of the series.
PW Comics Week: You’ve talked about how Y is the story of the last boy becoming the last man. What do you know now that you wish you’d known six years ago, when you started writing it?
Brian K. Vaughan: I like to think I've grown a lot as a writer and as a human being, but... have you ever read “Twilight,” that Alan Moore proposal that he wrote for DC? There’s a very clever bit in there about young John Constantine [the magician from the Hellblazer series] battling with old John Constantine, and young Constantine is taunting his future self. That’s kind of what this series has been like—the ending is largely what I came up with when I was a dopey kid who first pitched the idea to Vertigo. I’ve always wondered: “Shouldn’t I come up with a better ending? Why do I have such allegiance to this younger kid?” But he was the one who was smart enough to get this story off the ground. So if I could go back in time and tell myself something, I think I’d just say, “go, fuck up, and it’ll turn out when I pick up the pieces down the line.”
PWCW: Were there particular things you found yourself having to fix?
BKV: Yes—but there’s nothing I would have changed. We had opportunities when we collected the book to tweak little things in the individual issues, and there’s always that temptation to George Lucas things. But I fought that temptation—I took every mistake and every clunky thing and tried to weave it into the tapestry of the world rather than running from it. I was constantly fixing things that had gone wrong, but I was grateful for them, because usually good stuff came out of it.
PWCW: How old were you when you started it?
BKV: I was probably 21 or 22 when I came up with the idea, right out of college, and probably 24 when I first pitched it to Heidi MacDonald [then an editor at DC and now co-editor of PWCW and blogger for PW The Beat] and [Vertigo executive editor] Karen Berger, and after the long, slow, tortuous process of getting a book off the ground at Vertigo, I think it was my 26th birthday exactly when the first issue came out. July 17.
PWCW: Do you have any particular favorite moments in Pia Guerra's interpretation of your scripts?
BKV: For Pia, it’s any silent panel. Working with most artists, if you write a silent panel you think, “Ah, I hope they don’t fuck this up.” Even with good artists, a facial expression won’t quite convey what you hoped for, or the way it’s framed won’t carry the weight of what it was that you were trying to convey. In Y, there are countless silent panels, because Pia’s acting is so good and her decisions of when to push in and when to pull back are so accurate. I’d get back pages and think, “Oh, thank Christ, I’m not gonna have to redialogue that.” It’s hard to notice, but it’s part of what makes a great storyteller—that phrase is thrown around a lot, “great storyteller,” which usually means they’re not flashy—but it’s a nearly impossible skill to develop, and she’s one of the best.
PWCW: If there were one page from the series you could have on your office wall, what would it be?
BKV: Artists are always asking me, and I always feel—it’s half unworthy of holding on to their art, and half that I can’t stand looking at anything I’m partially responsible for. I never ask for anything. But back when I had a crappy old fax machine, because my computer was too slow to get scans, I remember seeing the first page that Pia ever faxed over, of Yorick hanging upside down in that Brooklyn apartment, and it was so exactly what I hoped it would be—and beyond my expectations—that I truly felt then that we’d be able to reach our ending, and find enough readers, because of her. So that page will always have a lot of emotional resonance for me.
PWCW: Any thoughts on the idea of a multiple-part Y movie [optioned by New Line and produced by David S. Goyer] that D.J. Caruso's been discussing?
BKV: Yeah, it sounds okay to me! But I don’t care too much, to be honest. People are always asking, “Who do you see as Yorick?” And I don't care. To me, Pia will always be all these characters. And even if it goes drastically wrong, it can’t hurt the book. The destination for me was issue 60. We’re not glorified storyboards for a movie; this was never a means to an end. I don't care if it’s one movie or 12 movies or a TV show—if it brings more people to the comic book, I will be very grateful.
PWCW: You’ve got the Y wrap party coming up soon, but did you do anything yourself to celebrate finishing the last issue?
BKV: No—I read J.K. Rowling talking about being alone in a hotel room, and she got to open up some champagne from the minibar and have a good cry. But when I was finished with the last script, there was no sense of finality to it—you know, the script is done, but it won’t be done until Pia’s pages come in, and then Lee’s colors, and the inks and the letters.... Even last Wednesday, when the book came out, I was sitting in an interrogation room with a homicide detective at Parker Center at the LAPD’s headquarters here in Los Angeles, for research for something weird—thankfully, I’m not a suspect yet in any homicides! So, no, I'm just working on the next thing. I've yet to sit down and have my J.K. Rowling cry about it.
