Y: The Last Man Omnibus

Y: The Last Man
Written by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra
Art by:
Pia Guerra
Goran Sudžuka
Paul Chadwick
Jose Marzan Jr.

Great action scenes, but...

... I can understand Brian Vaughan's perspective on this story. It's disguised as post-apocalyptic end-of-days struggle but really it's human drama. Like the kind you find in one act plays or soap operas. So I'm willing to overlook the background implications of what would happen if literally the world became a no-man's land -in favor of telling Yorick and Ampersand's story.

You gotta pick one or the other. Steven Spielberg tried to do both in War of the Worlds with mixed results. A similar movie he made later, set in a hellish landscape as well, Saving Private Ryan worked much better since the small army platoon's focus was kept to the mission and not World War II.

It's a perfectly clean rational world.

And I accept this. Chugging on through the pages of YTLM a few rules get laid down which look interesting. Like when a character -gasp- actually has sex with Yorick but is okay with letting him go to seek out his girlfriend. This hints at a larger consensus of how a woman would cope in a world without men. She'd share.

In spite of there being billions and billions of women in this story Vaughan still tells it from a masculine point of view. It might have been interesting to see the ultimate 'flip' of gender politics if you will. Like, if Yorick had been cast as the ultimate 'object' a talisman, a thing, a hope for a future put on a pedestal and idealized... a male sex god with a small 'g'. The rest of the world, run by 'regular looking humans' (read: female) getting on with their lives and without the constant media messaging about what a woman should look like. We live in a world with men, and with the lights turned on showing constantly an idealized female image to women. What if that were shut off?

It was Old Man Jenkins!

As it is, YTLM keeps its tale in the realm of a Scooby Doo cartoon. Characters are whisked in, given some page time, and leave the scene neatly. It's all about relationships, and this graphic novel doesn't dig too deep into psychology, not even Hero, Yorick's sister, who is getting schizophrenic visions of her former boss the leader of the Amazons. It's just a character quirk, and not an affect of living in this world.

Lastly, there's some cool humor told in dream sequences, like a giant monkey scene:

and a pseudo-Science Fiction story line:

Gladly too, not ALL the women left in the world are svelte supermodels.

Every post-apocalyptic property has its quirks. Watching The Walking Dead into its 9th season (yeah, I'm a late adopter) I notice every time a character announces they're going 'out there' another springs up saying 'I'm going with you.' Just once I'd like Carol or Enid just sit there reading a book and say 'that's nice. Don't get eaten.'

I'm waiting for Brian Vaughan having at least one woman say 'No men left in the world? Meh.'

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