Like many things in life, I arrived at comicbooks relatively late. I didn't read as a kid and it wasn't until college. The advantage of this was that I tended only to read things that were being recommended by people who'd done all the filtering for me. But I also learned to read them in book form (as opposed to individual issues). Beyond Dark Knight Returns (which I somehow found in my hands in high school), I believe I started with Sandman The Doll's House. So I came at comics from a point of literature.This is both good and bad. On one hand, I didn't have to be convinced that comicbooks could be more than fluff. I knew that they could be as powerful as any novel or movie or whatever. The bad side is that I expected them to do that.
Y: The Last Man is a series that ended recently. It began in 2002 and I had been told over and over that I had to read it, but as always I held off until the series came to an end so that I could read it all in one shot. (I also learned that I like series that have an end and don't keep going on and one, being passed from one author to another. This got me in a bit of problem since it meant that I stuck with Cerebus until the bitter end (or bitter 2nd half as it were), but I am drawn to the idea on one authors vision.) Y: TLM, created and written by Brian K. Vaughan, is about a world in which a plague as killed every male on the planet save one young man (Yorrick) and his pet male monkey (Ampersand). (Vaughan is obviously drawn towards verbal puns/double meanings, especially in names. It becomes slightly overly clever at times but at least he sticks with it and makes it a motif.)
Well, I do love monkeys. And apocalypses. And speculative fiction (if this, then what... how does society respond and restructure itself... all the jazz). So Y: TLM was right up my alley. Vaughan does an admirable job. It is interesting watching a man explore what a society of only women would become. (I do so wonder what a woman's take on the same story would be.) Sometimes I felt the series fell into the trap of just presenting these ideas and not actually exploring. At other times I worried that it became too focused on Yorrick and the rest of the world was just an obstacle. But this is actually the book's strength.
See, Y: TLM, is actually a love story. That aspect can get lost in everything else, but in the end that is what it is. A simple "getting back to my true love" story. And I love those. I do wish that some of the more powerful elements of Yorrick's emotional growth had more of an impact. I would catch myself thinking "Oh, I'm supposed to be shocked/moved here more than I am." Perhaps the light tone of so much of the book under cut the more powerful moments. Or maybe the long list of red herrings Vaughan scatters through the story. But when the last pages are turned, the accumulation of events add up.
Did it live up to the hype? Maybe. It didn't come close to the emotional impact of Sandman The Kindly Ones.
But, hell, what does?
(Vaughan has gone on to write for the tv series Lost and thank god for that. He has also managed to slip a few references in - Ben's extending baton for one.)
