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Brian K. Vaughan would like to apologize. He knows everyone is dying for details about Dune: Part Three, which he cowrote with director Denis Villeneuve, but his lips are pretty sealed until December 18 when the film finally hits theaters.
“Sorry to be coy,” he says as we’re about to leave the New York coffee shop where we’ve been chatting. “I hope the day will come where I’m able to say much, much more. It was truly so awesome. I can’t believe it happened.”
Vaughan is in the city for New York Comic Con, but not to talk about Dune. Ostensibly, he came to the convention to talk about Paper Girls, the comic he created with Cliff Chiang that was turned into a 2022 Amazon Prime Video series. During the Paper Girls panel, however, the pair announced that they’re working on a new comic, Roam, a superhero sci-fi series set to come out in February of next year.
Roam, Vaughan tells me, came from a deep desire to work with Chiang again. They’d considered doing a short eight-page story or maybe a one-shot, but eventually they said “Fuck it. Let’s do an ongoing series.”
Vaughan has the kind of career writers of a certain ilk would kill for. He started working on comics in the 1990s and has been the pen behind favorites like Saga, Y: The Last Man, and Marvel’s Runaways. (Those last two got turned into TV series; the outlier, Saga, is a story people have wanted to see adapted for years.) He also served as a writer on Lost and created CBS’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Under the Dome.
Still, his heart remains in comics. “I think sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, are you just going to sell out, Vaughan? Are you just going to go to Hollywood full-time?’” he says. “But I’m only able to do work in Hollywood because I have comics.”
Here, he speaks about Roam, his worries about AI, and maybe a little bit about Dune: Part Three as well.
On Roam, his forthcoming comic with Cliff Chiang:
It's completely unlike Paper Girls, completely unlike anything I've ever done. It’s set in the distant, distant future. The logline, as it were, is that in the future, everyone will get to be a superhero, but only while they're young. We're trying not to reveal too much more than that.
I remember seeing The Matrix, and having no idea what the fuck it was gonna be about. That was such a delight. So we're trying to do that here. I've been doing this for 31 years. I started when I was a teenager. I have a Spider-Man story here and there. I did a little Batman, and Ex Machina was my sci-fi political comic that sort of deconstructed the superhero. But this is certainly my first true superhero book.
On his fears about AI impacting comics, film, and TV:
It's terrifying. My friends who work in previsualization and as storyboard artists, these jobs are going away. I've heard about editors going away as well. Show business is a business, first and foremost. I’m lucky to sort of have been grandfathered in. I think there will always be people who are interested in bespoke human-made stories. But the future is terrifying and unknowable, and coming at us very, very quickly.
I’m heartened by the fact I've got two teenagers who are so disgusted by AI and grossed out if they ever hear I used it—and I’ve certainly never used it for anything creative. But I do think we're getting pretty close to the day that someone could be like, “I'm tired of waiting for the next issue. Give me the next issue of Saga.” That's when you get to the point of, do you just want content, something that's a distraction?
In Roam there's an element of this as well; AI is a component in the story. So, it's something I guess I need to write about with my human meat machine to process, but I'm in the middle of thinking about it, as you are, every day.
OK, a little bit about Dune: Part Three, which he has seen:
I can't say very much other than it’s a tremendous, insane, ridiculous honor to be involved with it, and my contributions are modest. Denis’ true cowriter on this is Frank Herbert. The novel is the star. And it's obviously the greatest cast and crew ever assembled. It's a fucking beautiful movie. It's my favorite of the three. which I can say with genuine humility. I can't say anything other than it's just as wonderful as you can imagine.
I got special thanks in the first movie. I was doing a tiny amount of consulting. I was working at Legendary [the media company that owns the rights to Dune] at the time, and they just invited me in to see an early cut, which was as fantastic as the finished product. But I just ended up talking to Denis, honestly. Never before has a director been that talented, also that decent and warm as a human being. I wasn't anticipating getting this call at the beginning of three, but it's obviously a call I could not refuse.
I should probably just be discreet at this point. The movie doesn't need me to promote it. I'm reluctant to do anything that makes me sound more important to this process.
I am a small worker in the world of Hollywood. It is changing so rapidly that who knows what it's gonna be like tomorrow, six months from now.
But again, I've got teenagers and I see how delighted they were by Backrooms, by Obsession. It feels like Gen X has been force-feeding them a lot of my childhood stories that we have gussied up, and they are clearly hungry for something new.
On why he doesn’t write adaptations of his own comics:
I've taken stabs at it in the past. Richard Price, the novelist, I once heard him say in response to “Why don't you adapt your own stuff more?” that adapting your own work is like being a dentist and giving yourself a root canal. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. Let some other motherfucker handle that. I believe those were Mr. Price's words.
It's been constructive and a thrill to adapt other people, and I like getting to watch other people adapt me, but I've also been doing a lot of it for the last decade, where it feels like I've either been adapting or being adapted. I think that was part of the siren song of Roam. It’s time to break some new ground.
Denis says that to adapt something you love is to do violence to it. When I've been adapted, that has always been what I've told people. It is much more important for this to be good than to be faithful. He's a master of cinema, and cinema is rarely about people sitting in a room having dialog. How do you transliterate this to cinema? That's an alchemy that I don't understand. He's just unparalleled at that.
On Lost and why writing for commercial breaks was a challenge:
I love my prestige drama without commercials, but there was a degree of difficulty working on Lost and having a cliff-hanger five times an episode. To have that was such a challenge and so rewarding when you were able to pull it off. Can you write something where people are like, “OK, I'll just wet my pants. I cannot risk not coming back [before the break is over].”