Paper Girls’ Brian K Vaughan: ‘I hope the world is big enough for us and Stranger Things’

Creatively, we’re in the golden age of comic books,” says Brian K Vaughan. “They have never been more spectacular than they are now.” He doesn’t mention it – prudently, perhaps – but Vaughan himself is an integral part of this “golden age”. Over the past couple of decades, the Ohio-born comic-book writer has helped transform and vivify the artform through works such as the post-apocalyptic Y: The Last Man (with Pia Guerra), coming-of-age sci-fi Paper Girls (with Cliff Chiang), and the ongoing Saga (with Fiona Staples), a hugely popular space opera about childhood, parenthood and pacifism. He’s had enough industry awards thrown at him to furnish a pretty sizable trophy room – among them 14 Eisner Awards, 14 Harvey Awards, and a Hugo – and has built a wide and passionate fan following. (Saga, the series most fans would describe as his opus, has sold around 7 million copies to date, in various forms.)

“I remember growing up in the Eighties; you’d hear people say ‘comics have grown up,’” he recalls to me, talking from his home in Los Angeles, over video chat. “And you would recommend Maus to people. Watchmen. Dark Knight Returns. Then you’re starting to hit the end of things you could push on mainstream audiences. Now, my daughter is 11, and she’s read more graphic novels in her lifetime than I have.”

I’m speaking to him two days before the release of Paper Girls, the big-budget Prime Video series adapted from his and Chiang’s comic series. Paper Girls focuses on four tweenage delivery girls in the 1980s, who get caught up in a time-traveling intergenerational conflict. Comparisons to Stranger Things have been constant and inevitable, though the comic predates the start of Netflix’s glossy sci-fi sensation (by about a year) and the differences are, he explains, skin-deep. “It started after Cliff and I’d already been working on the comic for a while,” he recalls. “I knew that it had some surface similarities. But within the first three minutes, you realise these are completely different shows. I hope the world is big enough for both of us.”

Judging by the warm reviews and reactions to the series on social media, the world does indeed seem big enough. Vaughan, who serves as an executive producer, is no stranger to television – his CV includes stints as the showrunner of the CBS Stephen King adaptation Under the Dome and as a writer on ABC’s smash hit Lost – but says that Paper Girls required more of a hands-off approach. “My primary job is at the beginning,” he says. “And that’s selecting the right partners to work with, having a say in the cast. But after that, it’s about giving the creators freedom to put some of themselves into this. I didn’t want to see just the karaoke version.”

It’s been a busy year for Vaughan. After a four-year hiatus, January saw the return of Saga, an interstellar epic about a child born of a scandalous love affair between two aliens from warring planets. He’s also currently working his way through Spectators, an experimental standalone comic created alongside artist Niko Henrichon. Released via Substack, the comic is delivered to readers weekly, usually just one or two pages at a time. If the experience of reading something like Saga, through monthly comic releases, has roots that date back centuries – to the serialised writing of, say, Charles Dickens – then Spectators, with its piecemeal, molasses-slow distribution, feels like something entirely new.

Working outside of the constraints of mainstream comic publishing has had other advantages. While Spectators is breaking boundaries with how it is making its way to readers, it’s no less interested in pushing the envelope when it comes to content. The story begins in a post-pandemic cinema auditorium. A 43-year-old woman, bored and waiting for the film to begin, starts streaming pornography on her phone. Shortly after, the cinema becomes the site of a mass shooting; the woman becomes one of the victims. (If you were to come across Spectators in its final printed form, this would unfold over a couple of dozen pages. For the comic’s Substack fanbase, this spread over weeks.) While this is only the jumping-off point for Vaughan’s inventive, conceptually unique exploration of the afterlife, it’s about as ferocious a statement of intent as you can get. “Spectators is very much about sex and violence, and the way that we watch the two,” he says. “In the United States, we have a bottomless appetite for watching violence in fiction. Whereas we’re horrified by sex – even though, if the stats about Pornhub are to be believed, we’re all watching just as much sex as we are violence. But we’re watching it very privately, very shamefully.”

Such is the extent of America’s gun crime epidemic that the release of Spectators has overlapped with several high-profile mass shootings. According to Vaughan, previous attempts to explore gun violence have been thwarted by TV executives telling him it can’t be done. “Because if we try to release it, inevitably, there will have been a mass shooting in the United States that week,” he says. “And it would be insensitive to release that. What you have is this sort of self-censorship. We have this plague of gun violence in the United States. It is happening every day, and my children are terrified of it, and I am terrified, and everyone I know is terrified of it. And yet we can’t talk about it in fiction.”

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The fact that Spectators has been delivered directly to the inboxes of Vaughan’s faithful readership has probably stymied much of the controversy that would ordinarily arise from a book like this. But the same cannot be said for some of his previous works. Saga has been censored for its explicit sexual content in the past; Y: The Last Man was recently featured on a list of banned books in Texas schools. “For me, it does always reek of being a bit of a carny act on both sides,” says Vaughan, discussing the ban. “I recognise that for a lot of people this is not a laughing matter – it’s a worrying trend. But the side that’s banning it is not really interested in what their children are reading. They’re just trying to get what in wrestling they call ‘cheap pops’. And then we lucky authors who are fortunate enough to be banned inevitably see sales go rocketing up when this happens. The books become the forbidden fruit, the one thing you are not allowed to have.”

It’s also this commitment to adult content that has made Vaughan and Staples reluctant to sanction a screen adaptation of Saga – despite the series’ incredible following. Even if you leave aside the vast budget that would be needed for its interplanetary odyssey, networks would still be almost certain to insist on cutting down the sex, the violence – the fundamental humanity of it all. “People approach us every day about doing Saga as a movie or as a TV show,” says Vaughan. “But it almost always begins with subtraction. ‘We could do it as a movie if we make it PG-13. If we take out this character. If we don’t do this.’ Frankly, Saga has been so insanely financially rewarding to us that we don’t have the need to just sell it for the sake of selling it. But never say never.”

To many, an adaptation of Saga is seen as an inevitability. But despite his effusive backing for adaptations of Paper Girls and Y: The Last Man, Vaughan remains critical of comics’ inferiority complex. “Why do people who love comics see them as a stepping stone to get to film or television?” he asks. “It’s so demeaning to this medium that we all love. Comics don’t need to be the roadmap to get somewhere else; they can be the destination themselves.” I defy anyone to read Saga, or Paper Girls, or Spectators, and tell me they haven’t already arrived.

‘Paper Girls’ season one is out on Prime Video now. ‘Paper Girls’ and ‘Saga’ are published by Image Comics