http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1255191...

Stephen King describes this on the front cover as the 'best graphic novel I've ever read', which of course is not a helpful data point unless you know how many graphic novels King actually has read. Is Neum the prettiest seaside town in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Was Dick Cheney the greatest US vice-president ever to come from Wyoming?

I'm afraid it didn't really work for me, though I think I can see why Stephen King and his fans like it. The premise has our hero, Yorick, unexpectedly surviving some disaster which killed all other men - and I think also almost all male animals - in a contemporary earth; this last volume has him juggling contacts with his friends and lovers, and with the Israeli and Russian female military teams trying to capture him and his Y chromosomes.

I found the whole thing a bit unconvincing; almost all the surviving women seem to be young and beautiful, and where John Wyndham did diffirent bits of this story in various interesting ways, Vaughan doesn't. I think this is the tenth and last volume of a series of books about Yorick/Y, and perhaps earlier ones were more compelling, but this one won't be getting a particularly high vote from me. ( )

Although I spent the middle of this series kind of annoyed (how many /more/ ways can we develop for women to be crazy, violent, and selfish?), it redeemed itself in the last few volumes, and especially in this last one.

I was not as attached to the characters as some (perhaps because I read the whole thing in two days), but I still found bits of this volume shocking and surprising - the sort of events that make you gasp, and then make you acknowledge that they just /fit/.

I'm not often one for epilogue-type wind-downs, but I thought this was done nicely, and I really liked that the book pushed things to uncomfortable places that resulted from following the same train of thought and worldview it's set up in the previous nine volumes.

And I really liked the end. ( )

There was a point in Y the Last Man: Whys and Wherefores where I knew what was going to happen and much like Grover in the The Monster at the End of this Book, I just decided I wasn’t going to turn the page. If I didn’t turn the page the bad thing that I knew was going to wouldn’t happen and all the characters I had learned to love over this 10-volume series would live happily ever after.

Y the Last Man is a comic series by author Brian K. Vaughn and artist Pia Guerra. It tells the story of poor Yorick Brown the last man alive after a mystery plague sweeps across the planet killing everything with a Y chromosome be it man, beast, or plant. All of the male of all the species — wiped out in an instant.

And while every good feminist would like to think we’d handle everything just ducky, in Y we don’t do so swell. The story is harrowing and it follows the next four or five years as Y, his secret-agent bodyguard 355, and Alison Mann, a brilliant geneticist try to find out what in the hell happened and why Yorick and his male monkey Ampersand seem to be the only two males to survive the plague.

Full Review: http://www.minnesotareads.com/2009/01...

I bought a few single issues and read the first 9 volumes from the library. When I found out they had wrapped up the series and that the library was going to take its sweet time getting the final volume I just had to buy it. Now I want to reread the whole thing from the beginning. This is one of the best original comic ideas I have ever ready. ( )

The final volume of Brian Vaughan's Y: The Last Man brings the series to a worthy end, as the author tosses many of the core foundations of his characters and his scenario into the air, and seemingly allows the pieces to fall where they may. I definitely appreciate the final chapter ("Epilogue"), which throws the narrative forward sixty years in order to show how questions raised throughout the series work themselves out. While not all of the individual pieces of the end of the story are entirely satisfying, Vaughan deserves credit for taking considerable risks in drastically mixing up the core elements of his story - a safer conclusion was certainly within reach, and the fact that the author doesn't deliver the obvious makes this final volume worth reading. ( )