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Y: The Last Man is a comic series written by Brian K. Vaughan (Swamp Thing) and published by Vertigo. The series has received considerable acclaim from a wide array of critics.
The series' art is handled primarily by Pia Guerra. Much has been made of the fact that Guerra is a woman, but Vaughan insists that that is incidental. He says that Guerra's work simply fit best with what he had in mind for the series.
Y: The Last Man is Vaughan's attempt to subvert a classic male fantasy, that of being the last man on earth. In the series, a mysterious plague simultaneously kills every living mammal, sperm, or fetus possessing a y chromosome, with the exception of Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men, their survivors' guilt, and the knowledge that humanity is doomed to extinction. Vaughan meticulously crafts the new society that emerges out of this chaos, from the conversion of the phallic Washington Monument to a monument to the dead men, to the genesis of the fanatical ultra-feminist Daughters of the Amazon, who believe that Mother Earth cleansed itself of the "abberation" of the y chromosome.
The series follows Yorick's grudging cross-country odyssey to a laboratory in California, under the protection of Agent 355 of the United States Government's mysterious Culper Ring, and accompanied by Doctor Allison Mann. Mann believes she may be responsible for the plague, since it happened the instant she gave birth to her clone. The lab in California is Dr. Mann's; her primary lab in Boston was burned to the ground. She believes that with access to both Yorick and her past research, she may be able to find the cause of the plague. Though the primary purpose of the journey is to understand the plague, and possibly save humanity into the bargain, Yorick is more concerned with finding his girlfriend Beth, on vacation in Australia, to whom he proposed marriage over the phone at the instant the plague hit. He lost contact with her before she gave an answer.
Over the course of their journey, Yorick and his friends discover how society has coped in the aftermath of the plague. However, many of the women they encounter have ulterior motives with regards to Yorick. Early in the series he runs afoul of the Daughters of the Amazon, who want to kill him, and an Israeli commando unit, who want to use him to repopulate their country, and who see him as a strategic asset who can't be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy.
Though the subject matter of the series is entirely serious, Y: The Last Man is also noted for its humor. Yorick in particular is a source of one-liners, although the other characters have their moments as well.
Currently the series is being published monthly. Vaughan has stated that he has an ending in mind, and intends the series to run for sixty issues or so. The first seventeen individual issues have been collected in three trade paperbacks: Unmanned, Cycles, and One Small Step.
External link
- Vertigo (http://www.dccomics.com/vertigo/)
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