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Brian K. Vaughan: A Journey's End

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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So what percentage of Y's sales success would you attribute to Ampersand, the monkey?
BRIAN K. VAUGHAN: About 80 percent.

Your male protagonist, Yorick — how much of him is you?
I'd like to think I'm slightly less annoying and suicidal than Yorick. There's probably more of me in Yorick than any other character. I was also a really crappy escape artist growing up, and I used to do lame magic tricks. When I started writing the book, I was an impoverished college graduate, living in my tiny Brooklyn apartment and not sure what to do my life. In many ways, my journey from being the last boy on Earth to the last man on Earth has mirrored Yorick's.

Besides ''Safeword,'' what were your favorite issues to write?
Early on, we did this two-issue arc called ''Comedy and Tragedy'' which I would say 95 percent of readers really hated. We took a break — or seemingly took a break — from the regular storyline and started following an all-female theater troupe. Like I said, most people really hated it. But we made a decision to be the kind of book that could do stories like that, and Pia and I surged on it. Even though it was seemingly off the spine, the heart of the book is located in stories like those. Those issues reaffirmed our desire to tell stories we want to tell. If people wanted to come along, great. We were never writing it just for the audience.

One of the things I loved about this series was its romantic MacGuffin. Yorick's goal, from beginning to end, was to reunite with his beloved girlfriend, Beth.
Well, ''boy loses girl'' is one of the oldest stories; it's always worked. If you're going to tell a complex story with a lot of ideas, it's good to pick a simple, emotional MacGuffin.... I think guys like romance a lot more than they admit. I think when you see well-intentioned quote-unquote ''women's comics,'' with a certain amount of romance and a strong female protagonist — it's kind of nonsense. Pia and I always went against gender types. She really likes drawing motorcycles crashing through windows, and I like people sitting around talking about their feelings. I think in some ways, men might like romance more than women, they just like it best when they don't know that's what they're getting.

Of course, in one of the series' greatest twists, the main love story isn't about Yorick and Beth at all. Did you know from the very beginning that Yorick and Agent 355 — his mysterious companion/bodyguard charged with keeping the last man on Earth safe — would ultimately fall in love?
Oh, yeah. And I think if you go back and re-read the first issues you really see the groundwork of it happening. There were some people who thought we were too on-the-nose about it. They were like, ''Enough with the Moonlighting bulls---, we get it!'' And some people thought it came out of left field. Which is good. It means we did our job.

Two of my favorite moments from the final storyline. First, the big reveal of what Beth was planning to Yorick on the day the plague hit: She was going to dump him!
That was planned out, too. We tried to plant some red herrings, like maybe she was going to tell him she was pregnant or that she was having an affair or she had some secret. But I knew it from the beginning — probably stemming from the fact that I had been dumped just prior to starting the series. Any writer who gets dumped, that's all they can write about.

The other big reveal was a non-reveal. We saw 355 whisper her true name into Yorick's ear, but you didn't share that info with the reader.
Would you like to know what it is?

NEXT PAGE: ''I think a certain amount of ambiguity is what brings beauty to work — which I know is scary to hear, coming from a guy who works on Lost.''

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