Brian K. Vaughan Quotes

I make no secret of the fact that writing She-Hulk can serve as an opportunity for me to sneak in some really cool characters that I personally love. Some will be obvious fits, but others will come out of left field - but that's what's fun about the Marvel U - the bench is deep.

I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

I love the comics so much, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character - probably, I think honestly, the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

By the time I finished the first series, 'Marvel Universe vs. Punisher,' I knew that there was a lot more story to tell.

I have a terrific editor in Molly Mahan - she's the best - and Red Sonja has become up there with Black Canary as my favorite character to write, ever.

Some of the writers definitely got inspired by some of the story lines, but we are evolving in the 'Daredevil' story. So when it comes to 'Elektra', they didn't follow one of her specific story lines, you know. They really tried to capture what comes through the comics, but there's not one specific storyline.

The interesting thing I realized writing the 'X-Men' is I always had a sense of where I was going.

Overall, I'm happy how 'Original Sin' has come together. It's an amalgam of all I've done at Marvel, mixing the gritty, violent 'Punisher Max' stuff with the zany, light-hearted 'Wolverine & The X-Men' work.

My first draft of Marvel Knights 'Black Panther' was not funny at all. They smartly rejected the entire script and counseled me to inject liberal doses of humor into very serious subject matter.

I'd hate to be writing 'Adventure Time' comics and not be excited about it.

When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

Learning to write comics is, in fact, so bloody difficult because it's such a weird form that it does actually make you a bit more adaptable for other forms.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

You eventually come to the conclusion that there's only so much you can do with these established characters, and you start wondering who among us will be the one to create the next 'Superman' or 'Batman' or 'James Bond' or next 'Lone Ranger.'

When I took off from Providence, my only professional aspiration was what it had always been: I wanted to be a sportscaster. By the time I landed in the desert, I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to be a writer.

'Thunderbolts' I was mostly attracted to because I really wanted to write Punisher and Elektra and Deadpool, who are characters I have always really enjoyed. But the funny thing is that over time, I came to really like Red Leader; he became one of my favorite guys in the book. Sometimes characters surprise you.

I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I grew up reading a lot of superhero comics, so it's really fun to take a shot at one myself and see what happens.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

When I was auditioning for 'Gotham,' I got a handful of comics from different decades, so I had a perspective - it's been around for 75 years, which is a long time.