Even as he’s revising the Y: The Last Man movie script, Vaughan is writing the last half-dozen or so issues of the comic, which from the beginning he had planned to end with #60, due out next August. Y is a satire about patriarchal culture and gender roles whose twist is that there’s only one man in it. The premise is that something has abruptly and instantly killed everything male on Earth except for a 22-year-old escape artist named Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Over the course of the series, we follow Yorick across the globe as he spends five years growing, as Vaughan puts it, “from the last boy on earth to the last man on earth” and see how the world has changed — and hasn’t — without men.
Vaughan has had the conclusion ofY plotted out since he proposed the series. “I do sometimes second-guess the ending, because I was 24 or so when I pitched it. [He’s now 30.] Part of me feels an allegiance to that kid’s story — it could still change, but it probably won’t.” His collaboration with artist Pia Guerra has helped to shape the story’s course: “We sort of go against gender stereotypes. I’d like to have the characters sit around and drink coffee for 22 pages, and Pia really prefers motorcycle chases and people tossed through windows, so we complete each other in that way. Some of the best Y stories have been suggestions of Pia’s that take it in an unexpected direction. She made an offhand comment one day that if the protagonist is an escape artist, then an antagonist for him would be a master of bondage. That inspired ‘Safeword’ [#4 of Y], which has really been the heart of the series for me.”
Part of what makes Y work is its distinctive look and feel: a clean, direct narrative style that puts clarity first, with simple linework and flat-toned coloring. “I wanted to have the complexity be in the ideas, not necessarily the storytelling. We even have the little location-and-date panels — we don’t ever want you to be confused about where or when you are in Y. In Ex Machina, I sometimes like to deliberately disorient you: it’s a different approach.” That also has to do with his relationships with the artists who draw the two series. “Pia will give you exactly what you ask for but in a better way than what you ask for; Tony [Ex Machina artist Tony Harris] will never give you what you ask for, but he’ll give you something better than you were looking for and completely different. With Tony, I’ll write a full script, get the art, throw away my script, and then re-dialogue everything. But I’ve told Tony that it works well that way: we play to each other’s strengths in a completely different way than Pia and I do.”
Ex Machina is a political comic — or, rather, it’s about the American political process. Its protagonist, Mitchell Hundred, accidentally gains the power to control machines; after he saves the second tower of the World Trade Center in 2001, he’s elected mayor of New York City, and the series concerns his four years in office, and his struggle with the far more complicated “great machine” of the political system. Hundred the would-be hero, as Vaughan keeps pointing out, is an independent and a centrist: in its first two years, Ex Machina has critiqued both the left and the right.
