Brian K. Vaughan: Y: The Last Man

I'm sure that there has been a time in every (heterosexual) man's life when he has wished that he was the last man on Earth, so that chasing after women would be infinitely easier. Brian K. Vaughan thinks so, and thus is the basis for Y: The Last Man, the story of Yorick Brown, the last man on Earth.

Y: The Last Man may be a comic book, but it is definitely worthy of literary analysis. There was actually an article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday about how more and more comic books are achieving the status of literature, and Y is full of themes, excellent characterization and plenty of social commentary. The story begins with a horrible and seemingly unexplainable event: with one exception, every male on the planet suddenly and violently dies. The only survivor, Yorick Brown, is a 22-year-old amateur escape artist. He is an average man; he is thin but not overtly muscular, has a sense of humor that not everyone gets and is reasonably good-looking. He was on the phone with his girlfriend, who was in Australia on an anthropology trip, and was about to propose to her when the incident occurred. The phone went dead before he could finish his question, and this "inconvenience" regarding the phone was the first of very many setbacks.

With the instantaneous loss of 3 billion people, things are naturally going to go to hell. But even worse, these 3 billion people are the ones more likely to work in blue collar industrial jobs. More men than women (in America at least) work at power companies, and this results in losses of electricity across the country. And not only power, but the food industry crashes, cars driven by dead men are backed up on the freeways and the economy crashed (ok, so men also dominate white collar jobs). This is not exactly what we had in mind when we thought of what it would be like to be the last man.

Yorick's mother is a Congresswoman, and she introduces him to a special agent, known only as 355, to protect him (more on that in a second) and a noted geneticist, Dr. Allison Mann, who will study him to determine why he and his male pet monkey (the event wiped out every mammal with a Y chromosome, including Y-carrying sperm) were the only survivors. The trio was going to go from Washington, D.C. to Boston to go to Mann's lab, but are forced to head to California to go to her secondary lab when the first is burned down. As I said, Yorick needs protection, and the people he needs protecting from burned down the lab.

In the wake of the "gendercide", an organization called the Daughters of the Amazon rose up, believing that Gaia finally cleansed the male "scourge" from herself. They travel the country tearing down the shrines built to honor the dead loved ones, attacking male impersonators who make money by, um, servicing the needs of women, and hording rare food items. When they learn that a man has survived the purge, they make it their mission to complete the work of Gaia. Furthermore, a group of Israeli soldiers are tracking Yorick down in order to preserve the Jewish people. They fear that if Israel's enemies can repopulate first, the Jews will finally be eradicated. Their fears engender terrorist tactics in their pursuit of Yorick that put the lives of his friends at risk.

On Yorick's journey, he encounters various reactions to the unmanned world, which serve as reflections of the way the our world works. For example, when Yorick impregnates a woman he meets in an abandoned Catholic church, a group of nuns descend upon her, believing that her baby is the Messiah. The Church has been in shambles without men, since the Pope cannot be a woman. When the baby is born female (remember, all Y sperm died too), they abandon her. There is also a story taking place in a town with functioning utilities. The twist is that the town is populated by ex-cons who learned how to work factories while they were incarcerated. These "dregs of society" are functioning better than the "normal" people. And these are just the stories that take place in the US. Eventually, Yorick's journey takes him across the world, where we see how various other nations have coped with being the last generation of humans. Some countries have descended into drug use to dull the pain, while others have learned to adapt.

I'm not sure if this was a theme that Vaughan intended, but one thing that I pulled from this story is the seemingly paradoxical nature of men. One of the explanations given for the gendercide (and the one that I adhere to) references the idea that men may be obsolete, since in the age of test tube babies and clones, all women need to continue the human race is sperm. However, if there were no men, where would new sperm come from? Furthermore, we see a world that is at first torn apart, but then learns to cope with the absence of one of the genders. And finally, as a character points out, in a story about a world full of women, the lead character is still a man.

Up next: Defy authority...