As concepts go, Y: The Last Man sounded decidedly corny.  Some sort of disaster wipes out every male on earth, and Yorick Brown is left alone as the last survivor on an all-female planet. 

Of course, the potential silliness of the concept is precisely what makes it work.  Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra took a dreadful cliche and inverted it by taking it seriously, and following through on the logic of the premise.  So we have a largely average protagonist who becomes remarkable simply by virtue of not being dead, attempting to follow through on a fairytale quest, and we have societies slowly adapting to half the population vanishing overnight, leaving women to take on roles from which they'd previously been actively excluded.

Admittedly, there's always been a bit of fudging around the edges; the series tended to gloss over the practicalities of getting rid of the corpses, which wasn't as thematically interesting.  And yes, there are some dodgy stories scattered along the way.  The bondage/intervention issue sticks in my mind as, er, perhaps not entirely successful.

But here we are, after five years, as the book draws to a successful close.  "Alas" is an epilogue, set sixty years in the future, in a Paris where life is finally back on track.  Mass cloning has produced new generations of women, and scientists have finally started to release a tiny handful of new Yoricks into a world where they're clearly doomed to be curiosities.  The story sees Yorick #17 coming to visit the geriatric original.  It's a framing sequence for some flashbacks which, to varying degrees, tie up the fates of the supporting cast.

The younger Yorick is played more as a son than a copy; having grown up in his world, he seems to accept his position in life.  But he's also hopelessly naive, which provides a neat device for the original to look back on the way he matured over the course of the series and how his life changed after.  The flashbacks range from relatively straightforward closure to a beautifully affecting sequence with the final death of his monkey.  Pia Guerra is at her best with these understated emotional sequences, though her elderly Yorick is also impressive stuff.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Brian Vaughan comic without a gratuitous factoid or two.  His tendency to shoehorn almanac trivia into stories used to be his most glaring tic, and while he's toned it down a bit, it's still a recurring feature.  I'm not sure we necessarily needed to be regaled with details about the division of labour among the Bushmen - especially as it begs an unanswered question about the new world. Are we really saying that the Bushmen are being replenished by Bushclones?  Or have they died out?  The happy ending which Vaughan gives to his world (if not necessarily to his hero) is a touch Eurocentric.

But that quibble aside, this is a fine ending to the series - not so much a resolution as a farewell to the characters and their world.

Rating: A

back | continue