Y The Last Man: Book 1 - Unmanned
- Mar 3, 2016
- 3 min read
Y The Last Man: Book 1 - Unmanned, by Brian K Vaughan, Pia Guerra & Jose Marzan Jr, Vertigo/DC
COLLECTING first four issues of an Eisner Award winning Vertigo series, It was the collection of the series as a trade back collections that helped turn it into a long running success, one that’s apparently in development as a television series.
The premise is that a plague envelops the world, literally overnight. The results of this kill 48% of the planet’s mammalian population: who all happen to be male. And most of those guys surviving appear to have a sperm count of nil. Except our titular hero, Y, or more specifically Yorick Brown.. .and, ahem, his pet monkey (Imagine Ross and Marcel from Friends and you’re getting warm).
Brown would like to meet up with his girlfriend, only she’s in Australia and the running of the world seems to have ground to a halt so there’s little chance of him getting there (or at least until near the end of the series I assume). Which kind of makes it useful (or dangerous?) that his mother’s a congresswoman because with a male president, senate, and what have you all having bit the big one, women are now in charge.
Only they’re turning out to be about just about as bad as the blokes they’re replacing: same angles, personal agendas and morally ambiguous frustrations. It’s all a bit cut and dry in this collection because stock characters are being presented, and I keep considering the variable possibilities of how over the breadth of the series we could see these people position themselves over this sequential chessboard.
This is a near-future America as we’ve seen it in many a movie, and comics too: all those isolated groups living out in the sticks are coming into their own as major power groups, tussling and killing each other for supremacy... It’s an attempt to keep that Wild West frontier spirit going in a new age... It’s like Mad Max with a Max Factor makeover.
The post apocalyptic survivor aspects remind me of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Slash Maraud mini-series, not one of their best collaborations, but interestingly published by DC Comics some years back. While its theme of a planet where women still just might need a man to help them procreate was given a unique twist back in the mid-eighties when - again DC - published Me & Joe Priest; a graphic novel by Greg Potter and Ron Randall that had a sci-fi theme where a plague left only a Catholic preacher fertile.
So the basic tenets of this book, as they’re presented in this collection, have been played out before.
What’s different here is that they’ve been given a modern spin and all these things are presented for the first time, and very palatably I might add, to a new generation of readers: technology, politics, social defragmentation; the media as news versus TV dinner entertainment; those things are present, and with hindsight you can slowly perceive how Vaughn will develop them to make this book a success while Guerra is adept and sympathetic in her visual continuity.
It’s the portrayal of women I’m unsure about in this particular collection. I want to see this book as pre-feminist for all the right reasons but so far it doesn’t offer me enough in that area.
I was actually reading Wonderful Today, the autobiography of Pattie Boyd (written with Penny Junor) at the same time as this, and while being concerned how Ms. Boyd’s supposed free spirited 60s lifestyle ended up with her literally being a doormat for a couple of rock stars, I couldn’t help but see that even in liberated modern America not much has really changed: people still try to take advantage of each other, no matter what their sex.
For Brown it’s mostly a case of playing the part of a fugitive from women-kind: some want him to breed with, some to kill him because his sort should be hunted to extinction, and some want to experiment on him to see what is that’s kept him alive. With a female government agent playing the part of grudging sidekick and Brown’s amateur escapologist tricks there’s some humour to offset the dystopian angle. As an adventure book this first collection generally works (it has an oddly endearing 80s comics style pacing to it). Its themes however struggle to find space.
Sponsored by Target Media.
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