Y: The Last Man – Unmanned

And now, the first of two new graphic novel series I’ll be in the middle of. Which, counting the Sandman reread, brings my total to five. I approve of this, inasmuch as so far they’ve all been really fun and I get to catch up on a completely new medium. And that doesn’t even count the forthcoming Buffy Season 8 or the three or four years of old X-Men comics I’ve read lately. In theory, this indicates that I am 31 going on 11. In practice, there’s not been anything yet that I’ve thought was beneath me, discrete instances of eye-rolling at the X-Men stuff notwithstanding.

In Y: The Last Man, we have this fellow named Yorick. He is an escape artist, has a pet monkey, a girlfriend in Australia and a mother in Congress. Suddenly, mankind is wiped out! Well, okay, malekind. Because it’s not just the people, it’s all of them. Or maybe just the mammals? I’m not sure. The point is, amoebae are probably going to have a field eon before very long. Unless the women start cloning themselves, I guess. Or Jeff Goldblum’s curse comes to fruition and some of the females spontaneously become male? They might just die when it happens, though, because there’s no way to tell what caused the insta-death in the first place, or if it might be reversible. Except, wait. That guy Yorick, he might be relevant to the story in some way despite being male. Else, why bother to explain his circumstances?

As it happens, Yorick (and his wholly non-euphemistic pet monkey!) survived the world’s being Unmanned after all. Which, come to think of it, makes the name of the series a lot more sensible as well. The problems that face him are numerous: his girlfriend is on the other side of a world in which much of the grid has collapsed; there are roving bands of women on motorcycles who are removing one of their breasts Amazon-style and who think this is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened, and are on a crusade to make sure that whatever caused it didn’t miss any stragglers; everyone who is not Yorick and who does not want him dead thinks he needs to be studied and/or studded, in the hopes of getting things back on track; and hell, the two-party political system isn’t even finished being a pain in the ass yet.

Good art, fun and somewhat breezy storyline despite a fair amount of violence, a couple of good twists already. My favorite theme so far is the idea that men are not to blame for the patriarchal system in which we live. That is, they are, of course; they did it. But the point in the book is that it was inevitable. Nature abhors a vacuum, and once the horrible men in control of everything are gone, you can rest assured that some horrible women will come along and recreate the same system, never recognizing their culpability or the irony of their desires. I trust more themes will spring forth as the series progresses.

One thought on “Y: The Last Man – Unmanned

  1. Pingback: Shards of Delirium » Y: The Last Man - Paper Dolls

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