Brian K. Vaughan quotes:

When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil.

How is it possible that our parents lied to us?" "Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that..." "Everythings going to be alright.

How is it possible that our parents lied to us?Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like thatEverythings going to be alright.

I grew up with a sister I was very close with and a mom who was a powerful influence on my life. I was always close with women.

When I was in college, I was belittling the woman who later become my wife for not knowing who Boba Fett was, and she responded by asking me if I knew who the Prime Minister of Israel was. Surprisingly? Not Mon Mothma.

I guess my journey with comics began with stuff like Spider-Man and Batman. I started off with mainstream superhero stuff, which I've never abandoned.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to comic conventions in Portugal, France, Canada, and it's an honor to get to meet people from all over the world.

I've always seen 'Y' as an unconventional romance between a boy and his protector. It was always about the last boy on Earth becoming the last man on Earth, and the women who made that possible.

That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires.

It's interesting - I think superheroes get much more unfair derision. There are so many good superhero books being done. Science fiction is almost more reputable, I guess, at least a step up from poor superheroes.

I love doing research. I'm a film-school geek.

Fantasy/science-fiction stories have been around almost as long as each genre, but every hybrid now lives in the shadow of 'Star Wars.'

My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

I like animal sidekicks. They seem to be a pretty cool trope of post-apocalyptic fiction - just because if you're going to have this lone protagonist, they're going to need someone to talk to. Dogs are overused, and cats are dumb. So that leaves monkeys.

By the time you have your protagonist attempting to assassinate the Pope, you've sort of signaled that everything is on the table.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Sure, this will probably end up being another in a long line of emotionally crippling misadventures...but let's try to have some fun along the way.

I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.

Regardless of sex, everyone loses something in a war. But the first casualty is always the truth.

It doesn't matter who started it or what it's really aboutwar usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we're not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion's share of the suffering.

I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

It's TV shows like BUFFY and ANGEL that usually have an incredible cliffhanger every commercial break that amaze me.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.

I wanted to write a story about a future where everyone has a secret identity, in part because the Internet no longer exists.

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.""And everything awful used to be something good.

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

They hurt you. You hurt 'em back. Or maybe it is the other way around. Whatever. Someday you might find a way to forgive each other. But it won't be like it used to 'cause that pain never really goes away.

Fans of my books have just been supremely nice.

Well, I've always wanted to call my son Barr.""Like a tavern? Like a soap?""My father's name is Barr.""Oh. And I love it!

You're the one saying how vital offing these kids and grabbing their brat is to the war effort, right? Well, I'm telling you I need way more cash to do it right, so--Lying.How have you not murdered that creature by now?Oh, I've tried.

Gert: What... what just happened?Chase: I don't know, but guess who totally stole Cookie Monster's glasses!Gert: Whew, for a second there, I was worried we almost learned something.Chase: Ooo, look at me! I'm a big fluffy nerd!

For a lot of arcane shipping reasons, new comics, even digital ones, have a long history of only being released on Wednesdays.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

After 9/11, I knew I wanted to write about power and identity and the way Americans on all sides of the political spectrum often mythologize our leaders, which are themes that the superhero genre has always handled really well.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

Print and digital comics will always coexist.

I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.

I never like to talk about my own politics, but whether you're left, right or center, the 2008 race was definitely good drama.

I love other movies that have been made since, but I think more than any comic book movie, 'Superman' just totally seemed to capture superheroes in ways that others have not.

I don't think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I've always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it.

Every issue, the characters and I duke it out. They usually win.

My mom once told me that a good relationship isn't where the other person makes you feel better, but where they make *you* better.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

Just go out there and get your heart broken in, so it'll be ready when you really need it.

I'm not afraid of the world. I'm afraid of a world without you.

A comic script is basically a love letter from you to your artist,

We've all seen lots of stories about a young protagonist having adventures, and usually they're all boys, [and] there is sometimes a token female, or two.

The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.

Comics brought me to the dance. It'll always be my first loyalty.

I love that the book [Paper Girls ] gets to kind of evolve and change in each era. Our third storyline is our best so far.

Some people are haunted by their pasts, but not my family. I mean, how can you be haunted by something that never really dies?

Once upon a time, each of us was somebody's kid. Everyone had a father, even if he never provided anything more than his seed. Everyone had a mother, even if she had to leave us on a stranger's doorstep. No matter how we're eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too.

After ten years of toiling away in Hollywood, I realized that there's no better place for new ideas than comics.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

Doesn't matter if it's personal or professional, a good partnership takes work.

I've always thought of fantasy as a genre of best-case scenarios, and horror as a genre of worst-case scenarios.

If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.

Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

Comics are essentially films with fewer frames per second.

Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you'll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them.

What cruel creatures men are. Our bodies tell us to love so many, but there's room in our hearts for so few.

There's just something about that late '80s that suddenly feels like it has something to teach us.

I, for example, am a pompous asshole, but my comics are genius!

Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.

Yeah, that's right. Flee in terror, bitches!

We're not trying to be deliberately frustrating, but we are laying the tracks for a mystery, and it's one that we have all figured out. We wanted this to be kind of like the way that Cliff [Chang] and I felt about the Cold War in the '80s when we were 12.

Violence is stupid. Even as a last resort, it only ever begets more of the same.

No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins.

Victor: You guys have some kind of rallying cry? You know, "Avengers assemble?" "It's clobberin' time?" "Hulk smash?" Nico: "Try not to die.

Each collected edition of Paper Girls that we put out will largely be set in an entirely different era.

Okay, is anyone else worried that some of the fruit didn't fall far enough away from the tree?

Gert: Wake me when the fight scene's over. Kitty Pryde: Oy, tell me about it. Hey, I'm Kitty. You the token pacifist of your group? Gert: Not exactly. Pacifists are like vegans, I'm more of a vegetarian. I enjoy fish and occasional maulings.

But nothing warps time quite like childhood

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.

Reef aquariums are definitely the pinnacle of the hobby.

I'm just grateful to finally be telling a story with all females at the lead.

I don't start a story until I know where it's going to end.

I'm really happiest living life 22 pages at a time and putting things in little boxes on pages.

I've written about teenage heroes before, on Marvel's Runaways, and I remember at the time when I pitched it, it was a team that had more female members than males. Even that caused of much discussion about, "Will there be a market for this, and should there at least be equal number of male and females?"

There are a lot of differing opinions on that. Some people think you should change out more, but I think changing just 20 percent is less stressful on the aquarium and fish. Once you get used to the regimen, it's pretty easy.

We describe [Paper Girls] as Stand By Me meets Terminator.It's a story about nostalgia and childhood, but with an action-packed, sci-fi bent.

I mean, do you know what you get when you call a suicide hotline in New York city? A busy signal. Literally.

I just want to take a realistic look now, now that we have enough distance.

I just make crap up more than anything else.

There's a lot of dark stuff from the '80s that we don't think about.

I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath.

Brubaker and Phillipss books have always been about eight years ahead of their time.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

It's just people who grew up in that time are suddenly old enough to be creators themselves, but I think they have a little perspective. I'm 40 now, and I have children of my own. Before I forget my own childhood completely, I want to take some time to take a look at the '80s and think back.

We're always looking roughly 30 years behind us. In the '80s they were obsessed with the '50s and so on.

These are the young women [in Stand by Me] that we grew up knowing and hopefully they feel a little rough around the edges, because it's true to life.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland in 1988 and there was just one year where suddenly all of the delivery kids that used to be boys were suddenly girls. It happened at our church too. Altar boys were suddenly altar girls. There was just this sense that all these young women knew there were openings here to be the first of their kind.

I remember seeing Stand by Me, when I was around 12, and just feeling like, "This is so refreshing to see kids swear and smoke cigarettes like my friends." It just felt much more real than the Sesame Street version of childhood that I'd been spoon-fed.

I've never gotten anything but support and thanks from people for having diverse books.

People just want good stories.

Immigration confuses and terrifies me, so why not try to write a comic and make some sense of it?

I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.

I like things that are weirdly imaginative and couldn't be real, but I also like stories that are recognizable and relatable.