But after writing comics for almost 20 years, it’s become pretty intuitive.
Sorry, I realize most of these answers are probably enormously unhelpful. I usually have a clear idea where I want to take characters, but allow them to pull me in new directions if it feels right. Vaughan: No bibles, per se. By the time I see an artist’s first sketch of a character, I feel like I know him or her really well. Jensen: As you go about this, how do you develop the characters? Do you build out a character bible? Do they inform the scope and shape of the story? I greatly prefer my own insane process over the regimented whiteboard of the television writers’ room, though I completely understand why it’s necessary for that medium. I think about stories all day long, and I’ve found that I have a natural filter where the shittier ideas just get forgotten about, but the okay ones tend to linger. Truthfully, most of it is just in my head these days. And there are no templates I just scribble ideas into them as they come. Vaughan: I use the same cheap steno notebooks from Staples I’ve always used. Jensen: When you’ve decided a series is going to be a long one, or at least you think it will go dozens of issues, what’s your next step? How do you build out the plot? Are there certain questions or templates you use? What tools do you use? Do you like to outline with paper and pen? Or is it all on screen? Or on a whiteboard? Vaughan: I’ll just say that young children have made it much harder to find the time to write, and much easier to find things to write about. Jensen: Well, now I just want to ask a million questions about how parenthood has affected your writing. Saga is really a story about my children, and watching them grow up, so I kind of hope it never ends. The Private Eye was 10 chapters because that just felt right for a self-contained mystery about the nature of privacy. But now that I’m old and a little more stable, I can afford to let the story dictate the scope upfront. Ironically, by the time the series reached that point, Vertigo really wanted me to make it longer, but Pia Guerra and I both decided that five years had been just right, the exact length of time it took for Yorick to transform from the last boy on earth to the last man. Vaughan: Well, when I pitched Y: The Last Man to Vertigo, I was young and poor and just wanted some job stability, so I suggested that the series should last five years. I’m curious, when you initially have a concept for something, how do you go about deciding how long it will be? What are the things you see that make you think a project has the legs to go for multiple years? Jensen: I was looking over your body of work, and it’s an interesting mix of both shorter stories and some really long-form series.
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