Y: The Last Man

In the summer of 2002, a plague of unknown origin destroys every last sperm, fetus, and fully developed mammal with a Y chromosome - with the exception of amateur escape artist Yorick Brown and his surly male helper monkey Ampersand.

Issue 1 download from the publisher:

http://www.dccomics.com/media/excerpts/1736_x_1.pdf

The setup seems problematic.  Everyone dies instantly.  A slow plague might have problems with someone setting off a nuclear Armageddon.  But this instant crap is a little too much to swallow.  In the instant every man died, communications were cut.  Apparently a man was holding the telephone circuits open.

Our hero Yorick is a wimp.  A wimp makes for some humorous end times, but life is made even more difficult by two surly traveling companions.  Eventually, he is tortured until he sees that life is worth living.

While a lot of people seem to think that this is the best that comics have to offer, it is incredibly overrated.  Any story that is meant to be complex, and is to have complex characters should have several writers so that the all the characters don't seem like idiots all the time.  The characters need separate voices.  Characters traveling about together probably would know one another better, which admittedly is difficult in comic form, but they still have issues for side stories.

Y: The Last Man has an interesting premise, a couple of promising characters, but too much trying to educate the reader of the world in which  we live in now, and not enough of the world after the fall of man.  Designed to get your $180.

180 DOLLARS?!

A run of 60 issues @ $2.95 per.

Terrible.

There are no redeeming characters in this comic. It has for interesting situations, and a somewhat interesting puzzle, but the characters are idiots and abusive.

There hasn't been an issue where Yorick hasn't been belittled and put down. The author likes to go off on gender politics where he blames the ills of the world on men. Absolutely atrocious was the depressed Yorick being tortured until he saw life was worth living again.  Tom Cruise would lpve the taking care of mental problems through torture and interrogation. It bypasses those nasty psychiatrists and seems to take much less time.

The author is ignorant of biology, psychiatry, sociology, and yet has a doctor as a character. Many love the writing, but I suspect they like the pretty pictures.

Inconsistant at best. YB can wriggle out of a straight jacket upside down and hike across the country, yet AM gets on him about his shape. He is a college student, yet exhibits no intellectual curiousity.

The incident with the cowgirl posse is so over-the-top, yet AM doesn't even talk to YB about it.

If the writer wants to create complex characters, he should do so, and take notes. He should also consult with those who know something of what the characters would know in order not to produce something shoddy.

One of the creators left. Any news on that?

BKV is the king of high-concept. And, as high-concept goes, it's decent. However, none of his characters have any depth, and the stories tend to exhaust any potential character development extremely early on, and then just go through the motions as Vaughn approaches the rest of the series like a bullet pointed list of what needs to happen in what order until he eventually decides it's time to end it.

Y and Runaways both fell prey to this early one, and although I've only read a little of Ex Machina, it seems to be approaching that path too.