Customer Reviews

Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

While this may not be the most unique story idea (something kills of every male animal on the planet except one man and his male monkey), Vaughan's handling of the story is exceptionally well done. His characterizations are vivid and each has their own voice, making it easy to remember who is who from issue to issue (rather than waiting for this trade paperback, I bought all of the monthly issues individually as they came out). Vaughan also throws in some very interesting story concepts: women who used to be models now trying to find meaning in their lives, a new tribe of Amazonians, and a doctor who was about to give birth to a clone of herself thinking that it's all her fault.

Pia Guerra's artwork, while not outstanding, is very solid. She very capably imbues each character with their own individuality. She is able to convey emotions very well and her designs for this post-apocalyptic world are subtle (i.e., the world is still recognizable, but it is very evident that things have changed).

This title was a sleeper hit for Vertigo with the first two issues selling out quickly and prices jumping quickly. I assume that if you are here, you're at least mildy interested in this title. Do yourself a favor and pick it up. You will not be disappointed.

For a brief time a few years ago, it seemed that Vertigo might be in its death throes. Sandman had been over for a while, Preacher was ending, and Transmetropolitan had very little time left in its run as well. The new books being touted as flagship titles-books like Outlaw Nation, Swamp Thing, The Crusades, American Century-were not living up to expectations.

But luckily the writer of one of those failed projects (Swamp Thing's Brian K. Vaughan) came along just then and helped revive the line. He and artist Pia Guerra created a book called Y the Last Man that has quickly become one of the hottest phenomenons in comics today.

In the first trade paperback collection for the series, Y the Last Man: Unmanned, we are introduced to Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand, who are both somehow spared when every other male on the planet dies. This first book sets up many of the events that are to follow, establishing situations like that of Yorick's mother, one of the few female Congresswomen left who is now trying to rebuild the government, or that of the Amazons, a group of women who believe the Y chromosome was an aberration and the men deserved to die off.

There is a great sense of mystery surrounding this series. Vaughan has done a wonderful job of leaving certain aspects of the story unresolved yet still maintaining the fans' interests in what the answers to those questions might be. Readers might wonder, for example, what causes the deaths of all the men on Earth. Was it the removal of a mystical artifact from its homeland or an experiment in cloning gone wrong that killed the men? Might the cause have been some kind of biological weapon created by the government, thus satisfying conspiracy theorists the world over? It could be any or all of those things. Y the Last Man defies easy classification, using elements of fantasy, science fiction and political intrigue as a backdrop for its characters to explore, all while weaving an atmosphere mired in the unknown that keeps the readers in suspense.

But like all of the best Vertigo books, Y is driven by character more than anything else. Y rises above the standard plot devices that usually plague stories about the end of the world, because, despite being set in a post-apocalyptic world, it is not about that apocalypse. The reasons behind the deaths of the men are unimportant. Here the focus is instead on how the people left behind act when forced into this situation, and what is most amazing about this book is how true it seems, how real.

Most of the credit for that belongs to artist Pia Guerra for making the world resemble our own so closely that it feels authentic. When we see the congested highways filled with cars, behind the wheels of which sit the bodies of dead men, we feel the anguish the characters must, and it leads us to contemplate how we would cope with such a predicament. Similarly, Guerra convinces us the characters are truly alive with facial expressions and mannerisms that would give the best actors in Hollywood a run for their money, especially in our lead character Yorick and one of the villains of the piece, the Amazon leader Victoria.

Cleverly written and beautifully drawn, Y the Last Man is an incredible book that bursts through clichés and explores interesting characters in a world not too far removed from our own. The monthly adventures of Yorick Brown gain at least a thousand new readers each month, and as sales continue to climb, it is on pace to surpass Alias as the highest selling mature readers book on the market today. If you haven't yet jumped on the bandwagon and tried Y the Last Man: Unmanned, I can't help but wonder why.

(And I promise that the book is really better than that pun was.)

Comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan takes the old phrase of "the last man on Earth" and looks at what life might be like for said man. The story of Yorick Brown is one of tragedy and mystery, with a little humor thrown in for good measure.
Yorick is an escape artist. He is a recent college graduate with an English degree and is currently unemployed. He earns a little cash from his work as a magician and escape artist, but he depends on his beautiful and loving girlfriend Beth Deville for support (both financial and moral). Yorick's mother Jennifer is a United States Congresswoman (or Representative) from Ohio, and his sister Hero is a paramedic in Boston. Though each has their own troubles in life, overall, things are going well for the Brown family. Then a mysterious plague wipes out every mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome. Humans, dogs, cows, apes, their populations are literally cut in half within moments. No one knows why, but the surviving women tend to blame themselves. Notable among them are Dr. Allison Mann, a geneticist who gave birth to a human clone at the exact moment the plague hit, and Agent 355, a secret agent from a branch of the US Secret Service known as the Culper Ring, who at the moment of the plague, removed a sacred artifact from Jordan that had been said to cause a tragedy comparable to the Trojan War if ever removed from its homeland. Instantly, women everywhere are forced to live without their husbands, fathers, sons, and friends.
Although, there are two exceptions. Yorick survived along with his new male monkey Ampersand, who he was training to be a helper monkey. Why they survived is a mystery, but they are now the last hope of humanity.
In the wake of the plague, the world has vastly changed. Food is being rationed, most electrical appliances are down, and women are coping in any way they can. Some have committed suicide while others have resorted to cannibalism in order to eat. Many women erected a memorial to their lost loved ones by turning the (very phallic) Washington Memorial into a shrine. However, a fringe group of women, known as Amazons, emerged, claiming that Mother Nature wiped out the oppresive men so that women could inherit the Earth. They go around defacing memorials to the men, killing transvestites and any woman who oppose them, and when they learn of Yorick's existence, his death becomes their primary objective.
Along with 355 and Dr. Mann, Yorick and Ampersand leave to find a way to repopulate the planet. Meanwhile, Jennifer Brown remains in Washington, D.C. in order to try to rebuild the government. Beth is stranded in Australia, and in Israel, a feminist extremist named Alter Tse'elon begins a hunt for Yorick as well.
Brian K. Vaughan, who is the writer and creator of one of my favorite comic series, Runaways, does an amazing job with this book as well. While the story may not be entirely original, it is still wonderful. The dialogue is very good, and since this is Vertigo, he can get away with saying things that he couldn't if DC or Marvel printed the book. The art is also beautiful. Another really good thing is that the story is contained within its own universe, meaning that no background in comics is necessary to understand what's happening in the story (as much as I love Runaways and House of M, I am a newcomer to comics, and I need my friends to explain some of the events to me).
This is a great beginning to a promising series, and I can't wait to read on.

Within the premise of The Last Man exists every junior high school boy's fantasy: being the last man on earth. While The Last Man could have been incredibly juvenile and explored more prurient possibilities within that premise, it does not. Instead, we get a really interesting exploration of what might really happen if all the men (but our hero) died.

This is the story of Yorick, an amateur escape artist and classic over-educated, underachieving slacker. In this story, Yorick is only a small player, a prize really, in a larger drama of political intrigue that plays out bit by bit as we read.

The dialog is brisk and funny. The heroics are plentiful but Yorick is only occasionally the hero of the scene. In fact, he usually plays the classically female role whose job it is to be rescued by the real heroes, which in this story are the women.

These are comics for adults and the language and storyline reflects that. The art is fairly simple as modern comics go and there are no capes or spandex to be seen. I've already read through the fifth volume and can't wait to see what happens next.

I found this to be a mediocre read. I think the book is intended to be somewhat politically challenging (what if women ran the world?) and suspenseful (only one man survives, etc.), but I think the unintentional comedy gets in the way. The premise, first of all, is too funny to take seriously: Not only do all human males simultaneously die, but all male animals as well. The y-chromosome marks all males for death (except, of course, one guy and his male monkey). Never mind that the XY system is a human invention or that many animals don't have x- or y-chromosomes.

What really bothers me is the characterization of the many females in this book. In principle, I don't mind that most of them are gorgeous stereotypes, but I found it difficult to distinguish them. There's little variation in the faces of these women. You have to rely on hair color and skin tone. And who does their hair, nails, and laundry when all of the men are dead?

The dialogue is hackneyed posturing, but I still found it funny on occasion. I'm not sure if that is the intended tone. I think the book is supposed to be suspenseful, but the device of switching between time periods got old fast. You get a few pages in one time period, a tiny bit of plot happens, and it ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, and then you go on to another time period. It's fairly easy to keep the threads distinct in your head, and there seems to be a point to it, but there's simply too much jumping around, creating and filling in plot holes.

I think this book would be more successful if it didn't give off the vibe that the reader is supposed to seriously consider the political ramifications of the premise--the men are dead. When you make a sci-fi move like that, you have to be really good at drawing the reader in. The combination of weaknesses--a ludicrous premise, poorly distinguished female characters, silly dialogue, and flashback/forward device--is too much misfiring artifice to suspend my disbelief.

I missed all the hype about this series, and just happened upon the trade paperback at the library. It's good, very solid storytelling and art that grabs you, but is perhaps not quite as amazing as the many gushing reviews I've since read make it out to be. The premise, as the title says, is that some kind of plague spontaneously kills every male on earth at the same instant -- except a 20something slacker named Yorick and his monkey Ampersand. For some reason, this event also happens to sever his lame over-the-phone marriage proposal to his Playboy-proportioned girlfriend who is hiking around the Australian outback. Scenes of chaos from around the world are shown, and then we jump forward two months to find Yorick in Washington, D.C. trying to track down his Congresswoman mother.

Meanwhile, the mysterious nappy-headed Agent 355 is rousting the Secretary of Agriculture from her bed to inform her that she is now the President. Agent 355 was shown previously in Jordan, recovering something called the Amulet of Helene from around the neck of a female doctor, a plot point that does not resurface in this book, but undoubtedly will prove key later on. Another unexplained plotline involves a gun-totin', liptick-wearin', female Israeli army officer intent on invading the surrounding Arab nations in the post plague chaos and the mysterious person in Washington, DC who contacts her about Yorick. But most of the book is about Yorick and the question of what his role is to be in this post-man world. It seems there's an expert in cloning up in Boston who might be able to analyze his blood and figure out some sort of solution. Agent 355 is tasked with getting him up there safely, since he's arguably the most valuable item on the planet.

This is complicated by a growing movement of self-styled Amazons who celebrate the removal of men from the face of the Earth. When they get wind of Yorick, they send out a death squad to eliminate him -- a death squad which just happens to include his missing sister (an unnecessary bit of melodrama). They're totally over-the-top, reminiscent of some gang out of the film The Warriors, and their trademark is that they surgically remove one of their breasts! Despite the post-holocaust premise, there's plenty of sly humor to lighten things up. For example, in the background of one panel, Yorick's monkey is furiously hugging a teddy bear. Another example is the place women have selected as the memorial site for their men -- the Washington Monument. The straightforward artwork and paneling is appropriate for the subject matter, which is so story driven.

And yet, much as I liked the book, there are plenty of missteps. For example, Yorick seems awfully oblivious to his own importance and repeatedly puts himself in stupid situations. The Amazons also seem far too extreme--the breast removal as symbolic gang badge is silly, and some of them carry bows and arrows in a kind of lame nod to Mad-Max, as if there aren't guns all over the place. There's also a laughable showdown between the wives of dead Republican leaders and Yorick's mother on the steps of the White House. It also seems a little ridiculous (and possibly sexist) that the infrastructure has apparently totally collapsed without men.

The book does a great job of setting up a potentially interesting story that cuts across genres (horror, science-fiction, thriller), but this first volume is all questions and no answers. Reading it without volume two on hand is like watching the first episode of a mini-series and then having to wait a week for the next episode to figure out if you really like it. I'll definitely seek out the next.

Brian Vaughan's Y: THE LAST MAN has for several years now been one of the most compelling graphic series around. The series is finally drawing to an end, though the final issues will not be bound into a single and final book until this June. The ongoing adventures of Yorick, Ampersand, Agent 355, Dr. Mann, and the others is finally concluding. The series hasn't always been at its best, but overall it has to go down as one of the finest long series ever executed.

The title refers jointly to Mary Shelley and genetics, the Y chromosome and the creator of Frankenstein's novel about the last living human being following a devastating plague (Shelley was so far ahead of her time in her two best known novels that it would be over a century before people were writing on comparable themes). Yorick Brown, a generally unlikable smartass who makes a living as an escape artist, is the last remaining human male, just as his pet monkey Ampersand, is the last surviving nonhuman male. The question surrounding what caused the death of all human males and why Yorick and Ampersand were spared is the subject of the next nine installments in the story.

I love so many things about the series. I like the wit and pop culture references (including extensive self-referentiality). Many of the characters are a lot of fun. There are some weaknesses as well. As mentioned above, Yorick is not often a very likable character. And some of the groups of females in the series are not very enjoyable, in particular the Amazons, who are more like absurd caricatures of the feminazis created in the fevered imagination of Rush Limbaugh than any believable group of real life women. Still, there are so many good things in the stories that one can forgive the occasional lapses. Later it become harder to forgive some pedestrian storytelling, but that wouldn't come until much later in the series. The first several books are just flat out fun.

I strongly recommend this series, especially with the final book in the series slated for publication in late spring. It will bring to a close well over a thousand pages of graphic novel goodness.

There's nothing in this first collection of "Y-the Last Man" to make me want to read more. There's a big story being told, but it's stuffed with so many dumb moments I can't care about what happens to anybody in this world. Take Chapter #2 alone: To Miss Super Model collecting dead men from their apartments to sell for food--May I suggest checking their cupboards for canned goods instead? And it's been two months since all the guys died, ladies, is there no one left who can figure out how to get the lights on in the friggin' White House? And the art is boring. And Yorick is a selfish putz with no common sense who seems compelled to antagonize people who can hurt him for the sole purpose of providing bursts of conflict in an otherwise eventless narrative.

There are LOTS of Vertigo comics I enjoy...but 10 books of THIS? No thank you.

(Disclaimer: I likely don't have a good perception of what comics are usually like, because I've never read one before picking up "Y: The Last Man" - so take this with a grain of salt, willya?)

Not having grown up reading comics, I was hesitant to start reading one. But during a recent snowstorm a friend of mine handed this one to me, and I devoured it. For someone who's never been into comics before, I was sold. I even went out and bought my own copies of all the issues I could get my hands on. Now i'm hooked. This story is refreshingly not how I envisioned comics to be - it's about an average guy in extraordinary circumstances. Brian K. Vaughn has done a great job of envisioning this world and making the female characters believable individuals instead of empty yet attractive fantasies. Yorick's sense of humor, the relationships he develops with the various female characters, the timely references all make this comic appealing because its relatable in an everyday sort of way, not in an "I can see some of myself in that superhero" sort of way, as I always envisioned comics to be.

One July summer the supposedly impossible happens: every mammal, fetus and sperm...anything with a Y chromosome dies. Yorick Brown, an unemployed English Major of New York seems to be the anomaly along with his pet monkey Ampersand. On finding out he is the only male survivor all he wants to do is go to Australia to find his girlfriend Beth. Of course not everything is as easy as it sounds, after two months a group of women known as the Amazons go around defacing memorials to men claiming Mother Nature killed all men on purpose so women could inherit the Earth. So of course when they find out about Yorick, they call him a deformed female poisoned by his own hormones and try to kill him.

Luckily he just happens to double as an amateur escape artist, which comes in handy when women either want to help him repopulate the world against his wishes, study him like a lab rat or just keep him from finding his girlfriend.So far everyone is trying to figure out what caused all the men on Earth to die. Is it about some ancient artifact hinted at being stolen or the fact that on that very same day a geneticist gave birth to a human clone? I love how its science fiction mixed with political intrigue, because Yorick's mother as a U.S. representative, is trying to help stabilize the government after some women are saying since men and all the founding fathers are dead their constitution doesn't apply anymore.

While writing this I realize a lot of what I'm saying is painting women in a negative view, but I don't think that's the aim of the graphic novel. This is like a feminist dream in that all the women so far are strong. I think if the situation was the other way around men would be desperate to fix things too. Perhaps they'd miss women a lot more though. I'm really curious about what's going to happen to Yorick. I really like him, and I like that he's not taking advantage of the situation and trying to sleep with everyone. At the same time he seems rather unconscious of his situation. He's not as careful as he should be considering he could be the last man on Earth and has a responsibility to the world now. As of the first five issues all he seems to care about is finding his girlfriend instead of helping prevent the extinction of the human race. So he's a super romantic stuck in probably the worst scenario ever. Can you imagine if it was the other way around? I'd hate to be the last woman on Earth. Somehow I thought it would be easier if it was a man, but Yorick has it pretty hard.

Y: The Last man has won a couple of Eisner awards including: Best Writer, Best Continuing Series, and Best Penciller/Inker Team and was nominated for the Hugo Award for best Graphic Novel in 2009. A film was in the works but is temporarily on hold.Personally I think a television series would be better. Shia LeBeouf and Zachary Levi were connected to the role and writer Brian K. Vaughan wanted Topher Grace as Yorick. This really messes things up in my head, because all I can think of is Eric Forman. If he was the last man on Earth...Earth would be doomed.