Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

Y - The last Man

Baobab Branches and Plastic

12:00 / 27.02.06

I starting to read all the Y-The Last man comics last night. At first I was... wow this is a great idea for a comic something pretty different and treated well with nice art-work.

I then started to get this nagging thing at the back of my head that in some sense the books was playing with ole 'last man on earth' lines strapped up with loads of fiesty female 'readers letters' stereotypes thrown in.

The comics are a lot of fun to read but I'm wondering if others consider it a bit of a guilty pleasure or actually a serious work?

12:03 / 27.02.06

Okay I had to use Google, so I can understand the new thread if you tried to use Barbelith's search function, but here's an older Y thread.

Baobab Branches and Plastic

14:07 / 27.02.06

Whoops the older thread does address my question rather exhaustively... sorry i didn't find it in my search.

Looks like most people either consider it a guilty pleasure or just crap.

and I agree that it does have a very Vertigo feel to it, no new ground being broken at all.

In fact on the whole its rather conservative. I mean even following the 'hey I'm the last man on earth why not have sex with every woman on the planet or become a high-priest man whore' is more outrageous and opens the possibility for a lot more interesting story play than the 'Old world moralist treks across america having adventures with his buddies' schtik TLM seems to be running with.

The former story line: could very playfully much about with reversed gender roles as well as societal stuff... on the whole, while I'm enjoying the story (and reading it all in one go) I'm starting to think TLM is a bit of a wasted opportunity.

I better writer for the series would have been Dave Sim... but he's already crossed this subject with greater sophistication despite being a devout misogynist.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:40 / 27.02.06

The comics are a lot of fun to read but I'm wondering if others consider it a bit of a guilty pleasure or actually a serious work?

As often as they're trotted out, I don't really know what either of those concepts mean, let alone divide the comics I read into one or the other.

Yorick's own individual ideas about sex and morality are a significant aspect of his character study. So far it has been revealed or at least heavily implied that his reasons for wanting to remain faithful to his fiancee are at least as much to do with his own sexual repression (influenced by various aspects of his upbringing), the argument that by doing so he is shirking his responsibility to (and even endangering the continued survivial of) the human race has been put forward several times, and he has strayed from his self-imposed monogamy at least once. The character's worldview does not equal the author's (although I strongly suspect BKV has first-hand experience of the worldview he's showing), and that's one of the most interesting things about the book. Yorick looks deceptively like an everyman hero for yeah-I'm-geeky-but-also-cool comics readers, almost a "Mary Sue", but this role is constantly being undermind.

I for one am glad that it is neither written by Dave Sim, nor an "outrageous" pseudo- or outright pornographic tale of a man fucking his way around the world.

Baobab Branches and Plastic

08:04 / 28.02.06

Ah well horses for courses,

If it makes you happy you can have your 90s 'anti-hero' protagonist running about with one dimensional female stereotypes!

As can I... mmm fanboy excretia

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:08 / 28.02.06

Hmm. In what sense, exactly, is Yorrick an anti-hero? He's not even really an unheroic protagonist - he keeps sneaking off to do unnecessarily brave things, often at least apparently to the detriment of the mission...

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:11 / 28.02.06

What would make me happy, Chief, is if you would engage a little bit with different points of view - for example, explaining what it is that you think makes the female characters "one dimensional female stereotypes". What is the overriding similarity or "dimension" that 355, Dr Mann, 711, Hero and both Beths (to take a few examples) have in common, and does it override any differences between them, or do you just not believe that they have any? Or if you meant that they just have one dimension each, then what is it in each case?

Baobab Branches and Plastic

11:13 / 01.03.06

Sorry its taken me a while to respond...

re: Yorrick as anti-hero! I meant it really in classic sense of him not being a overt superhero type, but thinking again, perhaps he is. Perhaps we can think of him like Arthur moving from a lowly adopted squire to become king of England. Or perhaps as you rightly say he is a hero by virtue of his doing brave things.

and in some sense i was refering to these comments from the older thread:

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

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.
-jack fear
characterization is a little thin with most of the women (somewhat unfortunate, given the premise) - chucklebound

as for one dimensional female characters: I guess that, as far as I have read, the female characters haven't really picqued much interest yet (Yorricks just met Beth the ex-stewardess). For me its a little 'yeah yeah 355's family dead and she's stone cold killer that might have feelings for Yorrick, the doctors in love with 355 so there is a nice little romance triangle, for the three mains as they traipse the countryside having adventures, cool (but not WOW)'

I'm sorry I can't give you more to banter about on it than tha