Just crazy, the stories he comes up with, like his graphic novel(pictured). It takes place in a world in which all the men have died of a mysterious plague. There's a battle for the last standing man. A mass female war. Yet amazingly, despite the far-fetched premise, the story still comes across as compulsively real. From the buzz-cut protesters cheering the demise of men to the widows of Republican senators who stage an armed coup, the fears, actions, and impulses of the characters who inhabitare absurd yet entirely human. And it's for this very reason that whenthat mad-hatter puree ofandwas foundering in season two --or maybe the right word is--one of the show's creators, Damon Lindelof, did the unthinkable: He took Vaughan, a virtual unknown in Hollywood, into a dark cave somewhere beneath Malibu and opened the creaky old book of's secrets. The effect felt almost immediate. Vaughan, now a producer, brought the show levity, weirdness, and political verve. Yet the scenarios, no matter how far-fetched or fantastic, still felt somewhat possible. It was everything that Vaughan had been doing while writing in near anonymity -- first forandand then for his own mind-tweaking comics, likeabout a superhero politician in post-9/11 New York. "I usually dream up a dozen or so profoundly stupid 'high concepts' for stories every day," says Vaughan, a 32-year-old Cleveland native. "When one is so bad that I can't seem to shake it after a few weeks, it usually means I have no choice but to write about it, often because that lame high concept is a way for me to explore something that makes me confused or furious about the world."

Following his success with Lost, Vaughan has been fully co-opted by Hollywood. He adapted Y for the big screen, and Ex Machina and Runaways, another graphic novel, about kids who find out their parents are supervillains, are next.

Like the conclusion of Lost, which Lindelof and cocreator Carlton Cuse have already sketched out, Vaughan has written his career arc -- his twenties dedicated to comics, his thirties to film and television, and his forties, hopefully, to novels. "I'd love to work with prose. I feel I haven't earned that yet, but I'd like to end up there eventually," he says.

Lindelof imagines something similar. "I've been in this town a long time, and Vaughan is one of the only writers I've met who writes purely for himself. That being said, his vision is so unpredictable, he's likely to conjure up one of those Being John Malkovich game-changing scripts that sorta fries your brain and then wins the frigging Oscar."

What Lindelof is talking about is a plot that is so absurd and fantastic that it rings oddly true, much like Vaughan's career.

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