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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you hook up with Pia?
BRIAN K. VAUGHAN: I saw some samples Pia had done and said, ''Whoever this artist is, we absolutely have to get him, because he's perfect.'' [Laughs. For the record, Pia Guerra is a woman.] I think everyone presumes that because Pia is actually a woman, we got her to balance out the ticket because we were talking about gender. That never had anything to do with it in my mind. I just wanted someone who could draw great performances, because humans were going to be so important to this comic. We didn't have costumes or super powers or anything like that. We wanted this to be the kind of book that you could give to your non-comics reading friends. That's a deceptively hard skill, to draw story clearly for everyone.

What was your collaboration like?
The broad strokes of the story were laid out from the very beginning. I knew how it was going to end, I knew who the characters were. But Pia changed the book significantly coming aboard, just because we would talk before every storyline began. For example, she said if Yorick was an escape artist, ''mistress of bondage'' would be a hilarious antagonist to give him. That so spun out into ''Safeword,'' which was a series defining-arc that really got to the heart of the character. [In ''Safeword,'' Yorick meets a mysterious woman — part ex-secret agent, part female shaman — who forces an increasingly troubled Yorick to grapple with past demons and lingering guilt over being the sole male survivor of the global pandemic.] At every stage, her input made the book significantly better. It's kind of like on Lost, you have a character in mind, but when we cast, we usually end up writing for that actor and his or her strengths. I think Pia was the same way. The way I wrote the characters changed the way she breathed life into them.

What was your key to writing female characters so well?
Well, it's interesting: I used to write Swamp Thing, and no one ever asked me, ''How do you write talking plants?'' So I always find it amazing that people want to know ''How do you write someone who is a member of the opposite sex?'' It's really not that radical from writing men. All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do. I'm sure it benefited greatly growing up with women and being married to a woman that I happen to love dearly. Imagination trumps experience for me. I just make s--- up.

When you say the women in your life helped inform your writing...do you have sisters?
I have one older brother and one younger sister — Molly Hayes Vaughan, the inspiration for the Runaways character of the same name [from the Marvel comic book created by Vaughan] — and our ''stay at home'' mother was and is a huge influence in our lives. (As is/was our father, to be fair.) The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee. For all intents and purposes, she is Agent 355...but I've never told her that lest she get the wrong idea about recent issues. But ever since I was little, most of my closest friends tended to be women, which I suspect is at least partly because of my geeky disinterest in organized sports and most things stereotypically masculine.

How did the monkey-as-sidekick idea enter the comic? Do you have a pet monkey?
I wish I did. 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. There's a famous comics legend that whenever DC Comics would put a monkey or an ape on the cover of a comic, the circulation numbers would suddenly shoot up. So if you go back and look at the covers of old Silver Age Superman stories, Superman is always fighting all kinds of gorillas. Just a bizarre number of gorillas. So it was just a cheap marketing ploy on our part to be able to put a monkey on the cover of a book. [Laughs]

NEXT PAGE: ''I think guys like romance a lot more than they admit...they just like it best when they don't know that's what they're getting.''


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