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Underground > Comic Books >

Y The Last Man

Matthew Fluxington

13:01 / 30.11.04

I've recently developed a vague interest in reading Brian K Vaughan's Y The Last Man. The premise is somewhat intriguing to me, but I'm not sure if I really want to invest a lot of money in catching up with the series. In this thread, I would like for you to either make a case for why I should read the series, or tell me why I shouldn't.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

13:32 / 30.11.04

I say go for it, less for the overarching concept (which is interesting and involving, but whose plot moves rather leisurely), and more for Yorick himself. He's quite the well-written snark machine. I've enjoyed following him around this dystopianly feminine apocalypse.

Matthew Fluxington

14:23 / 30.11.04

We live in the same place, basically - would you be up for letting me borrow the first couple volumes? I'm really hesitant to buy without trying, and I hate reading comic books on computer screens.

14:29 / 30.11.04

It's not perfect and occasionally a little drawn out, but it's very very entertaining and really quite good. Something that'd be really great to read on a plane trip or on a weekend afternoon when you're just chilling out relaxing and want a good yarn (best to get in trade paperbacks). Great cliffhangers, solid art. Brian K. Vaugnn rocks some good storytelling here. If Ex Machina is a 9/10 or 10 out of 10, Y The Last Man is a solid 7 or 8 out of 10, IMHO.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:33 / 30.11.04

I think the just released volume four has the 'Safe Word' three parter. After the vaguely disappointing astronaut story this picked me up again, especially as episodes one and two make you think 'oh god, this is a really bad bondage and whipping story'.

It's a slow grower. Elements of a grander story don't start getting hinted at until about a year and a half in, and only now do we seem to be getting either answers or hints to greater questions, two and a half years in. It's not a knockout book, but it's better than Codename: Knockout.

15:13 / 30.11.04

i read the first six issues. absolute rubbish. narrative devices out of long-cancelled tv shows. total fear of dealing with the sexual issues that arise from the dumb premise ('he's just a punchable greenwich village escapologist with a kooky pet that makes him seem interesting, like ross from friends, ...AND his m0m's the president?!?!??!?!?!'). hackneyed dialogue. stereotypical conflicted/ 'unpredictable' vertigo stock characters ('sure she's mossad, but - get this - she's sort of a goody, y'know? it's deep!'). an artist that looked at steve dillons later work on preacher and said 'well, comicbook art definitely can't get any better than this'. and needless to say, it being a modern american comic, nothing fuxcking happens in six whole issues. oh, tell a lie, he steals a motorbike and doesn't shag anyone.

a retarded pre-teen fanboy's vision of what a vertigo book should be like.

15:29 / 30.11.04

I had pretty much the same reaction, also based on the first six issues, i.e. the first TPB. The first part had some promise—its "countdown" fomat ratcheting up the tension quite effectively—but there was scarcely a moment in it that had any ring of psychological truth.

Nadir: the bit with an out-of-work supermodel driving a garbage truck to collect dead bodies while wearing a cropped top, skintight lather pants, and fuck-me pumps.

Or maybe it was the bit with Yorick's girlfriend poncing around the outback dressed in Daisy Dukes and a bikini top, little Australian wildlife creatures running up to nuzzle her hands like she was goddam Snow White.

Or maybe it was the cartoon FemiNazi eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil genius. Or the crazy scientist plumbing into Forbidden Reproductive Technologies. Or the way that Yorick's sister Hero goes from being a slut with no personality to a dead-souled man-hating killer with no personality. Gah.

I dunno: unlike FABLES, Y seemed like a book that might improve as it went along. And I've heard good things about it from people I trust. Maybe it gets a lot better.

And sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie, but I'll never know, cos I'd never eat the filthy motherfucker.

Oh and a Steve Dillon influence in the art? Nah. It's more a Chas Truog vibe, shurely.

15:40 / 30.11.04

When I first picked the series up I was sort of Blaa about it. The art was to me only Okay and the story seemed to be lacking "something." There where a fair amount of interesting subplots being set up but nothing quite WOW about it. Still I kept finding myself buying it just to see what happened next.

I think this turned out to be one of the story's greatist strength. A series of quite bizarre occurances (starting with the death of (almost) all men) continued to build and compound in very unexpected way. Sure none of them created a full on "punch," but combined, these situations as experienced through our young and rather annoying protagonist became increasingly involving.

Looking back I'd say it wasn't till around issue 9 or so where I was finally "WOW" about the book and one of it's cliffhanger endings. From that point on I realised that much of the meandering storytelling really did serve to ingross the reader in that world.

Meanwhile the art has served as a study in consistancy. It's clean, sharp an very emotive. It's been just over 2 years in the series as well as 2 years in the story. The use of flashback sequences work really well along with the occasional meanwhile that ignites an almost forgotten subplot of several issues previous.

there is a new TPB just out and the current issues are only 2 chapters into a new storyline. I'd imagine that reading the run right from the start could be very satisfying at this point.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

00:22 / 01.12.04

This is a book that frustrates me, and shows why the "Long form limited series" is a bad idea for some creators. Y started with a "high concept" premice, and if it wasn't green-lighted because someone at Vertigo thought it would make a a big budget movie, I would be surprised. While there is nothing in the first bunch of issues that was anything new, it was stuff that wasn't being done in comics NOW.

There's a lot of stuff in the "civilization falls apart" genre (hell, I write a novel in that genre every November), but nothing at the big publishers when this was started. So, niche filled.

There were a lot of interesting ideas that were tossed out, but as the series continues, they seem to be ignored for the "Our Three Heroes Meet Some Crazy Women" stories that feel like TV Episodes rather than a story with forward momentum.

The art is amazingly bland, and gives NO life to the proceedings, and reminds me more of Don Heck inked by Vince Colletta than anything else. Servicable, but that's about it. The latest trade paperback is the first one that really annoyed me, though. "Safe Word" felt like an editor said, "We need to get something trippy in here, maybe with some weird sex to keep the Vertigo crowd" and it was pointlessly inserted, while the second story read like an outline of a story rather than a story.

Oddly enough, even though I think it's by far the weakest thing in the Vertigo line, it's the best-selling.

23:13 / 01.12.04

i'll echo the above that the series drifted into "our heroes meet some crazy women" far far too many times lately. after the first 18 issues or so (just after the 3rd trade), it certainly falls into a pretty deep rut. that said, the last couple issues have sort of revived things a bit, in that they're actually getting around to storylines from the first issue.

characterization is a little thin with most of the women (somewhat unfortunate, given the premise) but yorick, while not an especially deep character, is a fairly likeable protagonist. not the best thing out there, but worth reading (esp. if you can easily borrow copies)

Haus of Mystery

20:52 / 02.12.04

Yeah, nothing appealed about this title, and the art seems SO dour and workman-like. I do read Ex-Machina, so I don't write off Vaughan, but the criticisms of this thread dinnae encourage me. And as ahigh concept - naff.

19:02 / 11.01.05

So I picked up the second collection, Cycles, to see if the book improves as it goes along. because, you know, I think I might have been unfair in my initial appraisal.

Turns out I wasn't. This stuff is really pretty dire. Yorick himself is a vastly unappealing character—self-righteous, weak, and none too bright. 355's sudden love interest in Yorick came out of the blue, Hero is a continued non-starter, and Victoria the FemiNazi continues steadily more cartoonish until dispatched in a scene that makes one wince at the ill-advised use of the adjective "hatchet-faced" a few pages previous.

None of it seems like evn remotely-plausible human behavior.

You can tell the writer is in love with his own cleverness because he keeps pointing it out to us: where a Girgio Morricone will litter his scriopts with pop-culture references left and right and leave them lie, for you to get or not, Vaughan drops his allusions and then points them out ("Hey!" one character will say helpfully to another, "That's a David Bowie line!") so you don't miss them, and so you cannot fail to appreciate his genius.

And the art, which wasn't so great for starters, gets quite a bit worse: in the Marrisville scenes, the large cast of characters look mostly alike, which fucks with the storytelling something fierce.

00:44 / 12.01.05

I was thinking about this and I had a vague hunch Matthew might well quite enjoy Ex Machina.

Maybe not.

Regrettable Juvenilia

20:27 / 08.04.05

Well I wasn't expecting THAT...

Regrettable Juvenilia

20:34 / 08.04.05

Or rather, the foreshadowing was there, it's just I thought Vaughan would go for the more obvious Yorick/355 pairing. Huh.

00:05 / 06.08.05

I've been reading the series just finished the 'Safeword' storyline, and still have the rest of that trade to go. It's certainly nothing groundbreaking or even particularly impressive, but I'm caught up in the action and always want to read more. This is definitely a book that reads better in one go in trades because it really is extremely slowly paced. If you look at the way the panels are, there's always a bunch of blank space. I'm not saying the book should necessarily have more stuff happen in it, but there's a lot more room for character development that doesn't consist of jokey pop culture references.

And I find it odd that the series really hasn't explored the full ramifications of its premise after 20 issues. The fact that it took 18 issues to examine sex in the book, and even then it was only Yorick himself, not the wider populace is ridiculous. There's a lot of interesting storytelling material in seeing how women are dealing with the fact that men are gone, are they living together, have lesbian lifestyles become much more acceptable? Maybe we get to this later, but for now, the book is so stuck with these few main characters, we only get glimpses of the larger world.

But, even though there's a lot of problems, it's still a really compelling read, and the premise has a lot of still uncovered territory. Anyone know if Vaughan has given an idea of how long the book's going to run, or if he even has a definite end in mind?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:44 / 06.08.05

I got to the end of girl-on-girl and thought, that's it, I'm cancelling this. Over the last year I've lost interest in this title, it's road-movie-disaster-movie thing irritating me more and more as we pass through various groups of ill-defined one dimensional characters. But then the latest issue was at the comic shop waiting for me, I was in a rush so bought it without noticing it was there, read it and really liked it. It's his girlfriend's story.

When Vaughan is writting about pre-plague times, or people's dreams (like the sequence when she's a super-heroione, complete with the lower quality colouring) he's really good. It's just the 'real world' of post-plague times that he can't really hack. Which is unfortunate as that's where the comic is set. And after the big disappointment of the Sekaumat Ring turning out to be just four boring women, plus the threat last issue that the equally tiresome Israeli women are back, I'm not keeping this going much longer.

Regrettable Juvenilia

19:37 / 06.08.05

As a regular reader and someone who's quite keen on this series in general, I'll agree that 'Boy Loses Girl' is the best it's been in a while. It just kicks things up a notch, and makes Beth a character you actually care about, rather than just the object of Yorick's rather idealised, arguably species-threatening quest.

13:18 / 08.08.05

where is Flux these days, anyway?

yawn - thing's buddy

14:55 / 08.08.05

he was killed in the Jorgestan bombings.

show some fucking respect.

you . . . . animal.

ohhhh sorry - wrong board!

19:17 / 15.08.05

I finished the fifth trade, and this series is starting to lose me. It's not so much that what's going on isn't working, it's just that the premise gives so much potential for great stories, and then the entire book is just this really long, drawn out road trip. A lot of stuff happens, but I don't feel like the characters are going anywhere. Yorick is the only one with any real purpose, the rest of them are just there, and Yorick's goal doesn't provide for particulary interesting stories. He just keeps going towards Australia, and presumably will get there eventually.

What really bothers me is that this world must be so profoundly changed, but we only rarely get a sense of that. It's absolutely ridiculous that there hasn't been one credible lesbian relationship in the book, and we get no sense of how people are building family units now, are women moving in together as nonsexual families, or are people just recognizing that the men aren't coming back, and deciding to go into lesbian relationships. There's got to be a lot of conflict between the older generation and younger people over this.

Maybe the 'Girl on Girl' storyline touches on this, but it's just astounding to me that Vaughan isn't using this material with so much dramatic potential and instead just keeps this long journey, punctuated by the occasional action story going. I guess the key to a long form story is the sense that it's going somewhere, and also, you have to really care about the characters. Preacher did a great job of this, I cared so much about the characters, I stuck with them through some weak stories. These people don't have that same pull, and the longer things go on, the more the flaws in the book become apparent.

05:06 / 16.08.05

Sadly Girl on Girl doesn't do much to resuscitate things from mind-numbing boredom.

BUT I will say that the recent issue finally dealt with some of Beth's storyline. Something I feel like I've been waiting for years to read about. Was a good read, with cute interaction between Yorick and her.

Still, it better pick up the pace more now that she's being told about. It's been floundering for months now.