The Last of the Last Man

Okay, so this is ostensibly a music blog, but you can't listen to music all the time. Sometimes you need to read something while you're listening to music. And sometimes it's nice if the thing you're reading has pictures. So since everyone else on the internet wants to talk about Vampire Weekend and I don't, I'd like to devote a little space to a non-musical item dropping this week, the last issue of Brian K. Vaughn's ˆY: The Last Manˆ.

First of all, it should be mentioned that I'm a huge comic book geek. In the past couple years I've been a little more "out" about it, but I've been a pretty regular comic book reader for about fifteen years, since roughly the same time I started avidly listening to music.

It was also around the time that DC Comics started allowing creators, particularly writers, the freedom to do long-form stories that stretched over a number of years and ended when and how the creators chose to end them (assuming the titles sold enough copies to be viable) instead of the standard model wherein a writer would pick up an established character, write the title for ahile and then hand it off to someone else. Within the new model, creators also retained the rights to their characters, which is a whole other issue I'm not about to address here. The shelves are full of failed attempts, series that never caught on and had to be ended earlier than the creator intended due to low sales. In fact, only a handful of series have made it to their natural end (thinking here of Neil Gaiman's ˆSandmanˆ, Warren Ellis's ˆTransmetropolitanˆ, Garth Ennis's ˆPreacherˆand James Robinson's ˆStarmanˆ, a list which leaves out a number of amazing self-published works) and this week, ˆY:The Last Manˆjoins their ranks.

Brian K. Vaughn is one of very few mainstream comics writers who didn't earn their chops writing the capes. In fact, BKV's superhero work before ˆYˆwas pretty unsucessful: Vaughn claims he single-handedly ruined the ˆSwamp Thingˆfranchise, although to be fair, no one's really had much sucess with Swampy since Alan Moore. ˆYˆcemented Vaughn's reputation as a writer, earned him a spot on the writing staff of ˆLostˆand, he recently admitted, paid for his house.

The story follows a young amateur escape artist named Yorick Brown (his father was was an English professor who named Yorick and his sister, Hero, after minor characters in Shakespeare) who is the last male survivor of a plague that has wiped out every animal on the planet with a Y chromosome except for Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two are joined by a government agent named 355 and a geneticist named Dr. Mann and travel across the country and later the world trying to...well, that's less clear. Yorick's trying to find his girlfriend, who was in Australia when the plague hit. Dr. Mann is trying to figure out what caused the plague and save the human race and stuff. 355 is being pretty bad-ass and knitting a scarf.

Over its five year run, ˆYˆhas slowly and delicately developed its central characters while examining the results of eradicating every male on the planet. The characters run afowl of the Israeli army and the Australian navy, the dominant military powers in a post-male world (the Australian navy is one of the only navies in the world that allows women to serve on submarines). They encounter a community of escapees from an all-female prison, most of whome had been serving sentences well beyond those issued to men who had committed similar crimes. There's even a power struggle between the female Democrats in Congress and the widows of Republican Congressmen who believe they are entitled to their husband's seats (only five of the sixteen women currently in the Senate are Republicans). The series addresses gender imbalances built into existing systems of economics, ideas of beauty (although under the pencils of series co-creator Pia Guerra, there's not a bad-looking character in the series. Guerra, incidentally, is one of the very few prominent female pencillers in mainstream comics) and systems of government. Sex, particularly the sexual availability and responsibility of the last man on earth, features heavily in the series, but is dealt with carefully and in a manner that stays true to the characters. It's that finest type of speculative fiction: the kind that's intended as a mirror held up to the present, a medium for exploring ideas by shifting them and positing the ultimate question of whether the elimination of every dude on the planet is necessarily a bad thing.

I'm going into the final issue with a bit of trepidation. The last year of the series has been a little shaky, with the disappointing explanation of the plague's cause and a couple issues that felt like filler, returning to play "where are they now?" with minor characters from earlier in the series, but the last storyline has been nothing short of heartwrenching. BKV has opened the "it was all a dream" door and the last issue's cover (pictured) suggests he's not afraid to use it, but these are his toys after all and he can do what he wants with them.

Anyway, here's a link to the entire first issue (scroll down to the bottom) in PDF. It's like "The Stand" crossed with Three's Company, plus a monkey. The paperback collections are fairly cheap and totally worthwhile. Hell, I'll lend them to you if you'd like.