“I think when you get to the last page of the story, it was kind of a mission statement for where I wanted to go from here,” Vaughan explained, “which is that it’s perfectly fine to love the characters that we grow up with, and that there’s nothing wrong with keeping them alive and breathing new life into them but the real adventure for any creator is to sort of let go of the past and force yourself to create something new. So in a weird way, it would almost feel like a betrayal of the story and of the characters to go back to that rather than sort of letting their story being their story and for me to I think press on and hopefully keep creating more new things.”
–-Brian K. Vaughan quoted atBlog@Newsarama.
A key here is ‘knowing’ the characters past. I think you gotta know the rules before you can affectively break the rules.