Brian K. Vaughan started the year with a couple of marquee comics releases — the return of Saga along with the first 125-page digital collection of his NSFW graphic novel, Spectators.
With the former publishing monthly via the direct market and the latter trickling out with new pages each Monday on Substack, Vaughan and his collaborators are really spanning the different (and rapidly evolving) ways to put comics into the world in 2023. And he was gracious enough to make time for an interview recently to discuss both with The Beat.
We talked plot, letter columns, what it’s like to publish on Substack, and how it feels when readers are deeply emotionally invested in comics work. You can find our full conversation below…enjoy!
INTERVIEW: Brian K. Vaughan
ZACK QUAINTANCE: Saga #61 just came out after a six-month break. How was it for you and Fiona working within that kind of timespan again, coming off the much longer break between Saga #54 and #55?
BRIAN K. VAUGHAN: It’s just so wonderful to be back. I won’t speak for Fiona, but I feel like collaborating with her on Saga is my life’s work, so I’m enormously grateful to readers for their patience. Fiona and I each being parents of our own (separate) young kids now has definitely slowed down our maximum annual output, but I like to think it’s also greatly improved the quality of our storytelling. I’m as proud of this current “season” of Saga as anything I’ve ever been a part of.
ZACK: I’ve always liked how periphery characters come in and out of Saga, much as they do in life. There’s an instance of this in Saga #61. What’s your planning process for these returns, and how far (if at all) in advance do you know a character will be back?
BKV: I always leave room for Fiona and me to deviate from the roadmap if we eventually come up with cooler ideas, but major signposts like character deaths, arrivals, exits and/or returns have all been pretty carefully charted from jump. I hope it feels like unpredictable real life is just happening to these characters, but most of it cruelly predestined.
ZACK: It’s always felt like Saga is an extension of the hard-to-process moments of life, including current events. How are real world happenings and headlines poised to inform this new story arc? This first issue had me thinking about the housing crisis as well as what’s happening in Ukraine…
BKV: Don’t forget the fan-favorite subject of police corruption! Yeah, from our first issue, Saga has always touched on the fascinating or terrifying parts of our real world that a lot of sci-fi/fantasy stories tend to ignore. Despite all of the ray guns and TV-headed robots, Fiona and I are still just trying to process what we see going on around us on our own strange planet, where inequality and civilian deaths are predictable constants.
ZACK: Maybe it’s because we sat with the saddest moment in the story for years, but it feels to me like the audience now expects Saga to hurt them. Have you gotten that from readers, and if so, how do you feel about that?
BKV: It’s an incredible honor to write something that makes a reader feel anything, even if it’s just deep hatred for the asshole creators who did something terrible to their favorite character.
But I also recognize that whenever you have a story where major characters can and do unexpectedly die at any moment, some audience members will start to view each installment only through the lens of whether or not a character was “whacked.” If they weren’t, the episode is “filler,” and if a character does die, the episode is just the creators “keeping up the body count.” So it goes.
Death will always be part of all of our stories, but I hope it’s never the most important part. As a matter of fact, it’s been several years since a major character died in Saga, so maybe it will just be smooth sailing from here on out…?
ZACK: Saga has the best letter column in comics (please pet Hamburger for me). How much work goes into that, and how (if at all) does running the column inform your work on the book?’
BKV: Thank you so much for asking, Zack, because it’s an absurd amount of work! And since printing/shipping costs have gone up so much, we finally had to increase our price to $3.99 each issue, so letterer Fonografiks and I are trying to give readers an even longer letter column instead of more ad pages. Our dumb self-imposed workload has only increased!
BKV: My favorite part of Spectators is how we’re able to completely reinvent what kind of story we seem to be telling with every new scene, so I’ll avoid spoilers and just say that if any “mature readers” of The Beat are curious, we just released a digital collection of our first 125 pages, which you can read right now, completely for free.
And if you’d like to support the continuation of our story, you can also become a paid subscriber for 40 bucks a year, where you get instant access to a ton of exclusive extras, including a look at some of my “lost” comic projects like an improbable “Longshot/Kingpin” special with artist Pete Woods for Marvel, or my unmade screenplay for the comedy film Roundtable. But I know times are tough out there, so no pressure, thanks again!
Saga #62 is due out Feb. 22, and Spectators is publishing new pages each Monday via the Exploding Giraffe Substack.
