Never too late -- Y: The Last Man

[sigma7]

Rediscovered an old favorite while looking for something to read during my recent misadventures. Consider this:

In the summer of 2002, a plague of unknown origin destroyed every last sperm, fetus, and fully developed mammal with a Y chromosome (with the apparent exception of one young man and his male pet).

This "gendercide" instantly exterminated 48% of the global population, or approximately 2.9 billion males. 495 of Fortune 500 CEOs are dead, as are 99% of the world's landowners. In the United States alone, more than 95% of all commercial pilots, truck drivers, and ship captains died... as did 92% of violent felons. Internationally, 99% of all mechanics, electricians, and construction workers are now deceased... though 51% of the planet's agricultural labor force is still alive....

The only thing better than the premise of Y: The Last Man is, somehow, the execution. Almost all of the clichés you'd expect in this scenario are addressed and most are almost instantly dismissed. The plot -- the titular character's quest to find his girlfriend on the other side of the world -- unfolds elegantly as a few kinks are thrown into the premise and as characters' motivations bloom and branch. And those characters are vivid -- there's a reason two of them made MightyGodKing's top 50 comic book characters of all time list (a brilliantly accurate list, I may add). It ran a surprisingly consistent run of 60 issues, and you can read the first one here (PDF). The narrative is interesting -- it goes pretty much where you think it's going, and yet it will still surprise you. Maybe the premise is inherently sci-fi, but it wears a frightening plausibility throughout, without straining the suspension of disbelief. Though a few plot turns may render you completely despondent.

I'm fighting the urge to pick up all the collections in one fell swoop -- that and the deluxe edition of We3, which I saw multiple times last week. Sigh.

Try the first issue and let me know what you think (or, if you've read the series, feel free to rebut my assertions as to its quality). If it catches your eye, try the first collection, "Unmanned," and see if you can stop then. I think you'll enjoy it.

Comments

[aardy.livejournal.com]

I haven't re-read Y recently, so my memory may be wrong, but my impressions of the series:

Overall impression: Good stuff, I liked it a lot overall, but by the end I had more happiness to have one fewer title on my pull list than I had sadness to see a good series end.

After the first issue, I kept waiting and waiting for the quasi-mystical element of that amulet macguffin to be somehow explained in a quasi-scientific way as the cause of the mass deaths. Since it took *years* of our time to get around to doing a storyline about the real cause, that always felt more like a dangling then dropped plot point than a red herring to me.

Large chunks of the middle seemed to drag for me, especially the BDSM storyline, and the bits with whasshername's scientist mother. I think tightening up the story by at least a year's worth of issues would probably improve it quite a bit.

And I hated a goodly portion of the ending (and not in a "I can see that it's done well and it's supposed to make me feel that way" sort of way), particularly where 355 is concerned.

In fact, the second third (roughly) of the run felt like a completely different story being told than the first third to me, just using the same basic setting and the same characters. (With the middle third being transition between the two.) I have to wonder how much of the entire run was planned out in advance (other than perhaps the actual ending itself, and possibly not even than) and how much of the run was Vaughan faffing around in his sandbox until he finally thought up a story he wanted to tell.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Rereading it, there are an inordinate number of filler issues (well, I suppose, but I'm comparing it to, say, Transmetropolitan, which did have the virtue of Darick Robertson on every issue except the guest-artist-sequence issue) that do seem to putter around with ancillary characters, but maybe it's just that I plow through those pretty quickly (and they do go much faster in the retrospect than they do when you're waiting a month between installments). And maybe that's why some issues that dragged in the serial presentation are more tolerable to me in the collections -- could be a classic example of writing for the trade. Could also be that the timeline could be whittled down by ten or so issues, too.

I was actually okay with the 355 bit of the ending; my major sticking point with the endgame was that it focused on the least plausible and interesting character to me, one I was waiting to see more depth from after the first issue, but just never did, and she just became a monotonous monster. She never really materialized as a character to me, just a plot point. But as for the...let's say theme of the ending, I had trouble with it at first gulp but it's since grown on me, I guess because it's indelible. (And I do have a couple of gripes about the final issue, but not many.)

When I approach Y as a whole, I'm left comparing it to Preacher and Transmet as similarly-scoped self-contained narratives originally presented serially, and of the three, I think Y is the most consistent. Transmet in particular seems to be occasionally running out the clock (but part of that could be Robertson's style necessarily becoming a bit more sparse as deadlines and other commitments encroach), and Preacher all but explicitly states that the story shifted from under Ennis's feet without him realizing it. I think you're right -- I think the alpha and omega were in place all along, but I sense more than a little improv in the middle.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read every single Preacher collection--I can't bring myself to inflict that on my genteel sensibilities--but that was also the first series I thought of when trying to compare Y's inordinate amount of time on, first, side-adventures that are fun stories but don't advance the plot, and later, massive upwards-spiraling uber-plot that keeps finding new ways to pile on the insanity, with little direct connection between them other than the characters. (IOW, not actually constructed as one big story like they're billed as.)

Transmet... I definitely need to go back and re-read that, but that's another case where as soon as it moved beyond the A-plot being anecdotal stories told in 1-3 issues (even if there is an uber-plot in the background) into a single uber-plot (or a 6- to 12-issue uberplot) being the A-plot, it became a LOT less interesting to me. (I remember a couple of the longer arcs making me want to gnaw my leg off in order to Get On With It Already.) But you're probably right that the longer stories hold up better on a re-read en masse than they do in the monthlies.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Preacher a few times in its run, and there are still a few collections I don't have, but it went a long way in cementing Garth Ennis in my mind as a writer who loves throwing beyond-the-pale levels of 'shocking' content at the reader, but who has a core of optimism under a deeply cynical core. Ennis at least gives a strong feeling of trepidation as his conclusions unwind; you're hesitant for the end to arrive, if only because you know it's going to be a bloodbath. Wasn't a feeling I had with Y or Transmet; the former left me sad to see the characters go, and the latter seemed to be running out the clock a bit. I don't know how much of that is Robertson's style becoming sparse; I know Warren gave Bryan Hitch a one-sentence, three-word description for a two-page splash in The Authority, and Hitch made it pretty much the exemplar of "widescreen" comics, something you could linger on for minutes just drinking it in. And Robertson used to be that way in his earlier renderings of The City, but maybe after four years, the noise in the details gets filtered out for both him and the reader....

[aardy.livejournal.com]

Either that, or the advertising nanites ate away at his brain.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Well, if viewing The City unfiltered inflicts unto unacclimated people from our time brain damage, I can only imagine what having to render said megatropolis repeatedly on paper can do.

And he went from Transmet to The Boys. I don't know which is more damaging to an artist's psyche.