Y - The Last Man Book 2: Cycles
Y - The Last Man Book 2: Cycles, by Brian K Vaughn, Pia Guerra & Jose Marzan Jr; Vertigo/DC Comics
THE DAUGHTERS of Amazon head for Marrisville, Ohio. They’re women who hate men, some for legitimate reasons, but mainly because it’s easy to get caught up in some cult thing when you’re starving and homeless. They’re after a man in Marrisville, he’s Yorick Brown, possibly the last man alive after some genetic plague went wild across the world killing off mammalian males.
The Amazons want to kill him. It’s what they do to men.
Yorick, or Y, is stuck in Marrisville with his two travelling companions – Dr Mann who’s going to try and study him to work out why his genetics made him survive, and Agent 355 who the government sent to bring them both back to Washington. Marrisiville itself is quite lovely, a white picket-fenced little town with charming neighbours all around – kind of like the plus bits in Stepford Wives without the need for men’s machismo interference. The fact that the women are all escaped convicts from the local county gaol brings with it its own genuine charm.
This story is primarily about the Daughters of Amazon and the women of Marrisville meeting, and the consequences of that confrontation. It’s not quite what I expected, and that’s a good thing for a reader.
This collection features four issues of what was the regular US comic and an awful lot more events are packed into them than is usual compared to most modernish comics; in fact I’d say there’s twice as much story value given, with little padding. Guerra’s artwork is more confident and assured but also still evolving in this book and while some of the turns of phrase, and presumably in-jokes, require a better familiarity with American popular culture than I’m familiar with, Vaughn’s ear for dialogue captures a mood and pushes the story on to demonstrate that he has a unique literary voice. The first collection can now be re-evaluated whereby we can see the creators were busy putting the building blocks of their epic together, whereas here they’re in the process of developing a serial into what will be an epic.
Sponsored by Target Media.
