Pia Guerra

Any story needs to be held up to the yardstick of its wrap-up, and this is no slouch.

I'm not used to seeing comics throw all their focus and love on a single idea after so much time has been spent on what appears to be, you know, THE LAST MAN.

But here's a little secret. It's not really about him at all. It never was. And even after so much panel time, he's really nothing more than a red herring.

Do I need to spell it out?

Well, yeah! It's about women. Hello!! And this volume is doing a very show more fine job of it. All complicated and messed up as it is, how cheeky and sad and gritty and girly, it's just as crazy as the whole subject we've been sloshing through for this entire comic.

And it just feels right. One more to go! Let's see if the *ahem* hero gets his girl. :) show less

Y: The Last Man sounds like it would be exactly my thing - all of the men in the world spontaneously die except one (and a male monkey). The women need to rebuild the country, while figuring out what happened to all the males of the world. The general story is interesting and the art is fine.

However, the execution is terrible. This is a story in which all the men are dead except one, and it does not pass the Bechdel test. All of the women are obsessed with talking about the men who have show more died, or with the one remaining man, and very very few of them are at all concerned with the fact that all life on the planet is fucking doomed. The villains of this volume are the Feminists (why?) who go around destroying the legacy of and monuments to men (why?) until they learn that one man survived and then they try to find him so they can kill him (why?). While it's nice to see hundreds of women in a comic book, none of them are fully-developed characters, and the whole thing reads like some dude's fantasy about living in a world filled with only women who have to worship him.

The world-building is very inconsistent as well. If half the population of the world dropped dead it would definitely be crippling, but I don't know if I believe that there would be no electricity and travelers would have to WALK from DC to Boston and sleep on the streets instead of in a hotel.

For a story that is fundamentally about gender, it really misses the mark. show less

For sheer shock value, the main story of the penultimate book of Y: The Last Man is one of the best of the series. I ain't giving nothing away here, except to say that I think I literally gasped on pages 48 and 51, and the following pages kept up the revelations. There's a lot of answers and explanations, and sometimes it gets convoluted, but it's mostly satisfying. There is an answer of sorts for the plague, but as many reviewers before have pointed out, it's mostly nonsense. It doesn't show more both me, though, as I never really cared why the plague happened-- as in Mary Shelley's original The Last Man, the answer is unimportant. The plague is just there to reveal things about the characters and the world they/we live in, and it does that spectacularly.

Case in point are the two side stories in this volume, which really worked for me (though one wonders if Vaughan was spinning his wheels a little bit to stretch the whole thing out to sixty issues by putting these just before the climax). "The Obituarist" and "Tragicomic" both show the women, after four years on their own, beginning to build their own post-male world, and they're both good examples of what this series does so well, in trying to suss out what makes women women, and thus men men, and where it all comes from anyway and what we ought to do about it.

Y: The Last Man: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

This review is for the entire run of Y: The Last Man, not any single installment.

In an instant all the men, in fact every mammal with a Y chromosome, all around the world are wiped out. Except for one man and his monkey (and yes, the inevitable Beatles joke does eventually get made). That man, Yorick Brown, and his helper capuchin in training, Ampersand, are taken under the protection of a spy/assassin member of a secret organization answerable only to the President of the USA and sent to show more meet an expert in (human) cloning to try and discover why Yorick survived and how to continue the human species. And incidentally for Yorick to re-unite with his fiancée, last known to be in Australia.

Of course most of the story is about the troubles of being the only remaining man alive in a world that just lost half its population while trying to travel from New York to Boston to California and eventually most of the rest of the world. How would women react? What sorts of communities would they re-build? The short answer is well and badly, communities of hate and communities of inclusion, all with very recognizable human motivations. There are neo-amazons who set out to destroy any vestige of maleness in the world. There are the ex-cons that were let out of prison (what if the female guards hadn't freed them?) who form a community based around shared pasts and a belief in reform, responsibility and independence. Fanatic nationalists, drug smugglers, post-male feminist activist acting troupes.

Throughout the entire run a variety of possible causes ranging from disease, to curses, to divine retribution, to gaia/evolution re-setting a balance are proposed. The thing they all have in common, aside from never being definitively set as "the" cause, is that every single one of them revolves around the incredible hubris that the actions of a single person caused this to happen. Right along side the obvious parallel of the hubris that a single man could "save" the entire human species.

The story is well told, beautifully illustrated, and plays with a whole range of human emotions and motivations in a fairly believable fashion. If it skims past a lot of the practical details and problems, it at least acknowledges them in passing. My biggest problem is that while any given installment contains some time references like "New York, 10 minutes ago" and "Washington D.C., now" the actual timeline of the entire series of chapters (issues? installments?) is not clearly laid out. And it doesn't help that two chapters might take place in immediate succession, or weeks or months apart. That probably worked fine for anyone reading each installment as it came out each month but if you're reading them in collected and straight through it becomes slightly annoying and distracting. show less