Y: The Last Man Volumes 1-10
If you wondered how Brian K. Vaughan got to be a writer on Lost, here is the answer
Y: The Last Man Volume 1
July 31st, 2008 - So I started this week with the end. A slow Monday morning, trying to get up the enthusiasm for the week, reminding myself that I get money for giving my time. Sitting on the train, that feeling of blasé dread was lifted when I remembered I had the last of the Last Man collections in my bag. Most of my rereading of the series for this review has been done on the train to and from work. I can usually go through one trade paperback in each direction. This morning I only had the one. Volume ten, the end of the story.
When I read I can’t hear anything that’s going on around me. Combine that with a deep seeded hatred for humanity whenever there are more than five of us in a confined space and you can see why I bring books with me on the train ride to and from my paycheck. Often that escapism means there’s a little moment when I look up from the book, a second to readjust myself to reality. I’m sure you’ve done it too, gotten so caught up in a story that you need time to realize that your loved ones are living people, with no inner monologue. Time to readjust to the swarm of people coming off a subway platform that are not in fact, the living dead you saw in Shaun of the Dead. This morning though, I went through readjusting in a major way. The finale of a 60 issue series, one in which you’ve invested so much time in, potentially years if you read the series as it was originally published, in which you’ve come to know the people in the book as people first and fiction second, well it takes a while to really come back to this thing we call real life. And as I sat there I wondered, how did all the rest of the men on the train survive the gendercide?
I should fess up now and say that I love it when the world ends. Give me a post-apocalyptic story of pretty much any variety and I will line right up. And probably dig it quite a bit more than I should. There’s probably a really insightful psychoanalytic bend to me loving it when the world meets a fictional doom. But hey, when the shit hits the fan that’s when things get interesting. You get to see all the rules change. A supermarket is no longer just a supermarket. A highway that can't be navigated because it is full of cars with dead people in them is no longer just a highway. The rules of everyday life change and that creates so many weird, yet totally plausible obstacles for the characters. So in 2002 when I heard that Vertigo was putting out a series about all the men but one dying, I was stoked to say the least.
Right now what I should be talking to you about is the beginning and the end. If you’ve never read Y: The Last Man before, then really I should be selling you on how the story kicks into high gear right away and what a crazy ride you’re in for. I need to get your butt over to the bookstore or comic shop to grab the first trade paperback. And then if you’re one of those people who have already read the first nine trade paperbacks I should be telling you all about the last trade paperback, which came out just a short time ago. Just to make sure that the last trade is worth picking it up. But really, if you’ve never read Y, whether I talk about the beginning, the characterization or the monkey, it’s all amazing. And if you’ve read everything except the end of the story, well of course you’re going to want to read the end; you’ve made it that far. So really, I can talk about whatever I want to. Which is good, because I don’t want to talk about the beginning or the end.
From one perspective Y is primarily a road movie, err, well a road comic I suppose. Say your thanks to a medium that almost solely stocks one genre of story for that lack of a proper naming convention. But the framework of getting from one place to another, that’s what I mean. It’s a genre that provides an easy plot device while keeping the scenery interesting. You have a firmly set goal with realistic options for attaining it. Which makes for great story even when you don’t add sci-fi premises on top. And if you do decide to set out making a fantastical story about something as crazy as every Y chromosome destructing, having an obstacle as ordinary as figuring out how to get from point A to Z is a great choice for grounding your story. Make no mistake, this story spans the globe. So that’s definitely in the cool category, but really it’s when you look at what has been draped upon said framework, that’s where the magic happens. This is where you find Y: The Last Man separating itself from its B-Movie premise.
If Y had focused on the loneliness of a world of widows, that could probably be interesting, maybe a tad depressing, but still I can envision a compelling yarn about that. But truthfuly, I don’t want to tell you about books that are going to be super interesting, and make you sad as hell. I loved watching Requiem for a Dream in 2000 when I had just broken up with my girlfriend, but seriously, I haven’t watched that movie in years for a reason. Y, thankfully, respects the amount of grief that a world of death would bring, but does not wallow in it. What Y does focus on, is men and women relating to each other. Maybe Brian K Vaughan thought killing off every single man but one would somehow distill that dynamic. I can see that, but really, however he approached this story what he ended up with was an exceptionally thoughtful study on gender relations.
Madmen started back up and everyone loves it. No wonder, it's a great show. One of the big themes there is gender imbalance. 1960's Americana, hot shot ad execs, hot secretaries, you can figure out that inequality of the sexes plays a huge part of that series without flipping on the tv. So when I talk about gender inequality in Y: The Last Man it's not going to be what you expect. There is a giant inequality in the story, only one guy with a whole world of women. Well, one guy and his monkey, but really every guy can describe himself that way. Y isn't about this one guy lording his status as last sperm repository over women or even abusing it, it isn't about all the women of the world outnumbering and ganging up on said guy. This isn’t the Road Warrior. It’s not about a society that breaks down to the point of no return. What Y is about is the very human and wholly topical dynamic between men and women and the slight, and sometimes not so slight, tips of power to and fro. Sex isn't the battlefield, but lines have been drawn and that's where Y lands. Straddling that line and trying to illuminate it for us all who have survived Le Grand Départ.
So with that here it is; I want to get my girlfriend to read Y: The Last Man. We love The Office together. We've lost many lazy weekends to Lost. Last Saturday we stayed in and watched the whole first season of Dexter. But like many a geek with girl, what I really want is for her to read some sequential art. She has liked a few things I've put in front of her. She ate up American Born Chinese. So it's not that she dislikes comics. I just have to find the one that will swallow her up whole and leave her asking for more. And with all of its wonderfully human characters and a plot that never lets down, I believe that the answer is Y.