Okay, I give up.

Everybody explains themselves.

I think I found a strong candidate for a desert island book. There's just too much to take in with one reading, not even reading it through from start to finish. Y: The Last Man is an epic journey, and I'm feeling that soldiering on to the end won't find an adequate reward in saying 'DONE FINALLY!' and closing it.

This is a book you sample once in a while, pick up the thread again. Why? No sense of atmosphere, no urgency.

No shortage of tough talk.

Post-apocalyptic stories like Soylent Green or Mad Max begin with a distorted reality from ours: overpopulation and pollution have made the world's food sources scarce causing a city like New York to resort to cannibalism. Nuclear war has sabotaged the modes of production to the point where petrol is more valuable than human life in the Australian outback.

A world where all the men have died except Yorick and his monkey Ampersand would -in my thinking- resemble some crazed opening scene from A Hard Day's Night with mobs and mobs of desperate screaming women -figuratively speaking- needing to get a hand on him; destroy him, mate with him, dissect his body. Yorick's every waking minute would be spent in trying to deal with that, would it not?

... yet some of the writing can be very well wrought, poignant and witty.

More cool dream sequences!

Soylent Green and Mad Max have in common a sense of the 'sinking boat' feeling about their respective worlds. Worlds that are sliding into chaos, into hell. That's where you get a sense of urgency, like watching the Titanic dipping into the Atlantic, and all the tiny people scurrying frantically around.

What's Brian K. Vaughan's world doing, what inevitable trajectory has he set it upon by removing virtually all the men? That's the part I'm missing.