Dark Horse has finally released a softcover edition of Brian K. Vaughan’s The Escapists this week. The book, which is based on characters and concepts introduced in Michael Chabon’s New York Times-bestselling novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and serves more as a sequel to that book than a tie-in to Dark Horse’s previous anthology of short comic stories featuring Chabon’s The Escapist character. It’s been available in hardcover since January 2008 and has, according to Vaughan, been an “evergreen” sales item at comic shops and bookstores around the country.

“it’s not connected to an event or a crossover,” Vaughan explained to Blog@Newsarama in a recent interview. Of course, he went on to elaborate, there is one book, the reading of which makes The Escapists better. “You can just pick it up. I guess I always imagined it would be great if we could have just a few of the people who read and loved ‘Kavalier & Clay’ could pick up this book but now I’m talking to people who picked up The Escapists, having never read ‘Kavalier & Clay’, and this book has led them to Michael Chabon’s novel which is definitely that kind of reverse commute that I never imagined happening but that’s very humbling if people picked up that novel because of this book.”

And that commute, as it turns out, is a pretty natural one. Not just because some of the concepts have carried over from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay into The Escapists, but also because Michael Chabon—winner of the prestigious Pen Award and author of at least three bestselling novels (Wonder Boys, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) that are or will soon be major motion pictures—called Vaughan, in character, to invite his involvement in the project. According to Vaughan, shortly after Dark Horse’s Escapist anthology, which featured a number of creators doing their take on the characters and concepts that Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay supposedly wrote back in the ‘40s, he received a cryptic and exciting voicemail.

“I came home and there was a message on my answering machine from Michael Chabon saying ‘Brian I’m calling with urgent League of the Golden Key business, so please call me back.’ I had never spoken with him or met him before but if he had called wanting me to murder someone for him, I would have been happy to do that. When I heard that what they were looking for was to do an ongoing, or at least a longer version of The Escapist, I said ‘yeah, absolutely, in a heartbeat.’ I just had to figure out what the hell I was going to write about.”

Vaughan explained that Chabon’s novel had been “a transformative book for me; one of my favorite novels ever,” and so it wasn’t without some hesitation that he acknowledges he sort of sequelized the thing. “It took a few weeks [to come up with the concept]. I don’t remember what year, but it was over Christmas break and I was just plagued by this. I had a rare week off, which is almost impossible to come by when you’re writing four or five monthly books like I was at the time and it was just ‘why the hell did I take this job?’ It seemed so hard to come up with a new take on The Escapist after so many spectacular creators had already taken a stab at him. Re-reading ‘Kavalier and Clay’, though, reminded me that the thing I loved the most about the book was not The Escapist, even though he’s a great character; it was the creators. It was the men behind The Escapist. So that was sort of the light bulb over the head moment for me, when I realized that if I could make this about creators, that’s where the magic would be…. I was mostly concerned that what I was pitching was less another pastiche Escapist story and more kinda-sort of a sequel to ‘Kavalier & Clay’. I would never be so presumptuous as to call it that but it was something that was set in that world, in the world of ‘Kavalier & Clay’, even though it was modern day and even though we just sort of hint at or suggest its connection to the characters of ‘Kavalier & Clay’. I still thought that would be a tough sell, but Michael was really excited about it and Dark Horse was really excited about it and so we were off and running.”

That said, it seems unlikely that the story will continue for Max and company; while Vaughan referred to The Escapists as “maybe the best thing I’ve ever written,” he said that the conclusion that the creators come to in the end is applicable not just within the fictional universe of The Escapists, but to Brian K. Vaughan as well.

“I think when you get to the last page of the story, it was kind of a mission statement for where I wanted to go from here,” Vaughan explained, “which is that it’s perfectly fine to love the characters that we grow up with, and that there’s nothing wrong with keeping them alive and breathing new life into them but the real adventure for any creator is to sort of let go of the past and force yourself to create something new. So in a weird way, it would almost feel like a betrayal of the story and of the characters to go back to that rather than sort of letting their story being their story and for me to I think press on and hopefully keep creating more new things.”

Which explains, Vaughan told Blog@, why he left the writing staff of the hit ABC drama Lost. Given the level of critical acclaim for the show’s writing, it couldn’t have been an easy call to make, to leave it after three seasons (the third through the fifth)—but Vaughan related it to what was going through his head at the time he was writing The Escapists.

“I think when I spoke to Damon Lindelhof and Carlton Cuse, the executive producers of Lost, I told them that I was haunted by the fact that by the time they were both my age they had already created shows of their own,” said Vaughan. “I think Carlton had The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which is an awesome show, and Damon obviously had Lost. And so yeah—I love Lost, it was a tremendous honor to be part of that show but it does very much tie into what I was exploring with The Escapists in that there comes a time where you have to push yourself to try and make something new of your own.”

But with one of his own creations—Ex Machina—ending in a few months with its fiftieth issue, what’s Vaughan doing next? And can someone who’s in the business of negotiating a movie version of Y: The Last Man and pitching TV shows even be expected to have a sense of when his next comic book will come out?

“For me there will always be a next comics project,” said Vaughan simply. “I do know what my next project’s going to be. I can’t talk about it just yet, which I know is annoying and creators should probably just keep their mouths shut until they are ready to go but definitely—I’m not leaving comics. I have some other cool stuff happening outside of comics additionally but I will always hopefully be first and foremost a comic book writer. I think before the final issue of Ex Machina comes out, I’ll be able to announce what comes out, so stay tuned I guess is what I can say for now.”

Look for much more of this interview on Blog@Newsarama and Comic Related in December, expanded with remarks by Michael Chabon, or listen to the audio podcast of my full interview with Brian K. Vaughan here.

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