A few months ago, I binged and watched the second half of the 3rd season of Lost all at once. I had put this off, primarily because Lost had gotten pretty horrible in its second and third seasons. But instead of rolling my eyes and sighing petulantly at the erraticness of J.J. Abrams (the show’s executive producer), I was instead spellbound by my DVR, unable to tear myself away for about three straight days. I was struck by the amazingly good writing and storytelling that seemed to come out of almost nowhere, but shrugged it off as pure coincidence.

About two days later I was IMDBing Brian K. Vaughan to see if he had started shooting the film version of his comic, Y: The Last Man (which I will talk more about later) and laughed out loud. Turns out, during the second half of season 3 of Lost, Brian K. Vaughan was the Executive Story Editor. The quality change hadn’t been coincidence; it had been the brilliance of a writer that I am already a fan of.

In many ways, Brian K. Vaughan is the anti-Alan Moore. The comic book author’s work contains almost no exposition (other than time, location, and date stamping), sharply defined and memorable characters, and a cinematic style (Vaughan is an NYU film school grad). Indeed compared to the expository ramblings of Moore that often seem tediously allegorical, Vaughan’s writing is tight, transparent, and constantly compelling. (Note: While I am well aware that publicly dissing Moore will get me beat up the next time I go to the comic shop, I stand by this assessment.)

The thing is, though, that Vaughan’s work isn’t just sharply cool and well-written. While he has written for several well-known comics (Batman, Superman, X-Men to name a few…) his work is most charged and compelling in three of his self-created stories. These comics–Runaways, Y: The Last Man, and Ex Machina–on the surface could not appear to be more thematically disparate. But the compelling thing is that all three narratives bear the cynical yet comical watermarks of Vaughan. It isn’t surprising that he comes from film school as, at the root of it, his auteurship shows itself deeply embedded within the stories themes.

At the heart of it, all three comics are coming-of-age stories, where the hero (or, in the case of Runaways, heroes) find themselves cast out of a previous existence and forced to question their formerly idealistic visions of the world around them against harsh realities. His comics are all about heroes who feel less-than-heroic, because being a hero can’t escape the foibles of humanity. Oddly, it seems, each of these stories approaches their coming-of-age from the vantage point of different actual age groups: Runaways is a teen story (and can be collected in appropriately manga-styled books), Y deals with the twenties, while Ex Machina captures the theme from a 30s+ standpoint. And yet, each manages to resonate the same lesson: the perfect adult life you dream of is never like you think it is going to be.

Runaways takes on this theme in the most obvious fashion of all of Vaughan’s comics. The story begins with six teens discovering that their families are actually a secret-society of supervillains who are covertly running the LA area through sacrificing innocents, and various other unsavory acts. The kids decide that the best way to rebel against their eeeeevil parents is to become superheroes. This decision is aided by the fact that slowly but surely, each of the teens discover that they (to varying extents) take after their parents in terms of superpowers. Thus, because each set of parents has powers from different sources (aliens, mutants, evil scientists, time travel, and magic), each of their prodigy gain some access (but not all) to the abilities that their parents had. They decide to run away and become a superhero team.

But this is not really the compelling moment of Runaways. Runaways gets interesting (and takes on the Vaughan-esque theme) at the point that the teens actually do defeat their families. It is soon after this moment that they become listless, confused, and ambivalent about what to do next. Their powers are not necessarily strong enough to defeat big-time villains with regularity, but their is an uncertainty about how they will survive without the aid of the evil parents they have become so dependent on (and dependent on hating). This theme is repeatedly brought home throughout the course of the first seven books (after which, the series is taken over by Joss Whedon). They are unable to trust, unable to psychologically cope with where they are from, and unable to escape it and thus trapped in a superhero lifestyle that sounded glamorous in the first few issues but quickly loses its thrill. This mood, it seems to me, most deeply resonates in Nico (the daughter of the magicians) who is able to pull a magic wand out of herself only by drawing blood (or cutting). The mechanics of her spell work (she is only able to use any spell once) is even more compelling about her power than the commentary on cutting that Vaughan has woven throughout. In other words, within her small set of powers she is, literally, never able to go home and constantly psychologically uprooted.

Y: The Last Man, on the other hand, takes on the you-can’t-go-home theme both more tongue-and-cheek and at the same time more tragically. Y revolves around a mid-twenties slacker, Yorick, who–along with the male helper monkey that he had been training at the time–survives a plague that literally kills off every male on the planet. Yorick then travels (slowly) from continent to continent with a scientist and a secret agent, all of them trying to hunt down the clues of where and how the plague occurred and how Yorick and his monkey managed to survive. More than Runaways, Y: The Last Man deals with several political and social issues including cloning, feminism, the middle east, and the social constructedness of science.

And once again, Vaughan pulls in his prevailing theme. Yorick, on the surface, is living out every man’s alleged fantasy–after all if you are the last man on the planet it means that (if nothing else) you are bound to get laid. And while Yorick does, indeed, get laid from time-to-time the experiences tend to be bitter and problematic. Most times, Yorick must hide in women’s clothing and pretend to be a male impersonator (certainly not doing anything for his masculine pride) and the notion that you are the father of every new human being on the planet is bound to be unnerving and depressing. In effect, Yorick is living the ideal 20s-post-college-slacker lifestyle–more or less couch-surfing and traveling from place to place and able to have any woman he wants. But it is ultimately unsatisfying and clearly not going to end well. Yorick, by the 10th book, is almost completely disillusioned and tired, making far fewer snarky comments and looking far more disheveled than he was when the series started. Being the last man on earth just isn’t all its cracked up to be.

Ex Machina, it would seem on the surface, bears the least resemblance to the usual Vaughan theme. It is another superhero story, where former engineer Mitchell Hundred finds a mysterious relic underwater and can, thereafter, talk to machines. He is, very briefly, a superhero called, “The Great Machine” but then decides that he can do more good in politics and decides to run as mayor of New York. Most of the comic takes place during the Mayoral period (with superhero moments told in flashback) and at the point the story is told from he has mostly retired his metaphorical cape and has become an entirely political creature–although not one without problems and regrets both of his life as a superhero and his life as a politician. The story, even more than Y, is wrought with political issues from terrorism, 1st amendment rights, invasions of privacy, and the relevance of art. The story itself is not without problems–most people who study technology would define it as any extension of man, and to that end there is no reason why Hundred can’t talk to pencils and bricks. But, still, it does raise some interesting discussions about the sentience of machines that are worth having.

The cynical coming-of-age theme is more deeply embedded (and less surface) in Ex Machina than it is in Vaughan’s other comics, but its key is that the series begins with a flashback to Mitchell Hundred’s childhood where he existed for the soul purpose of trips to the comic book store. It is very clear from the dialog and the events of the stories that the young Mitchell’s greatest fantasy was to be a superhero, and part of the character’s cynicism lies in that it wasn’t all he had imagined. Realizing that he could not help all of the people he would have liked to through superheroism, he resorts to politics which, it would seem, makes him even more impotent to affect real change or help people. While his childhood fantasies might center around saving and protecting those around him, his adult self has come to terms with accepting what he can get and knowing that he will never be fully satisfied (and never regain this previous fantasy of being able to change things).

Vaughan’s stories are all compelling on this basic and innate level: we are all in the place of his characters, constantly forced to face adulthood through the lens of how we thought it would be when we were younger. This is why Vaughan’s writing is able to resonate so deeply and really has more potential than most other comic authors to move beyond the mainstream comic audience (and at this same time, doing it without an overwhelming amount of unnecessary literary exposition). So Brian Vaughan? Thank you for not being another Alan Moore (and thank you for saving Lost.)

CBR Torrents:

Y: The Last Man

Runaways

Ex Machina