Long Read: "Y: the Last Man" part 1.1 (issues 1-5) by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, & Jose Marzán Jr.
A lad, poor Yorick...
Welcome to our first “Long Reads” on the Comics Syllabus Substack! We’re digging deep into the complete 60-issue/ten TPB/five Deluxe Edition series,“Y: the Last Man” from Vertigo/DC, written by Brian K. Vaughan with art mainly by Pia Guerra. So strap on your gas masks and rally your gang of armed congressional wives as we hop on this train to a post-male planet earth... But wait!
Before we dive into Volume 1…
The TV show is coming!!! After a long and troubled road to a filmed adaptation, “Y: The Last Man” on FX/Hulu starts streaming on September 13.
Briefly: until 9/13/21, “Y: the Last Man” is on sale on Comixology/Amazon! (I have the Deluxe Editions in hardbound and digitally already, but each is $5.99 for a bit, if you’re looking to pick them up.)
ORRRRR your library patronage or local bookstore is always a good (better!) route!
Reminder of our reading schedule:
September 3-10, 2021: Deluxe Edition v1, issues 1-10
September 11-17, 2021: Deluxe Edition v2, issues 11-23
September 18-24, 2021: Deluxe Edition v3, issues 24-36
September 25- October 1: Deluxe Edition v4, issues 37-48
October 2- 7, 2021: Deluxe Edition v5, issues 48-60
And also, we can’t read a book from 2002 without acknowledging today is the 20-year anniversary of September 11th. In addition to the reflection and retrospection, the grief at lives lost here in the US, as well as the many in resulting (and often misguided) invasions and wars around the world, I also can’t help but pause and feel appreciation for courageous public servants who enter danger to help others escape, artists who uphold humanity when authorities ascribe evil, and healers and rebuilders who raise generations from the rubble.
Okay, enough preliminaries. Let’s dig deep into volume 1! This post will talk about the first arc, “Unmanned,” issues 1-5. Monday night I’ll post about “Cycles,” the second arc, issues 6-10.
“Y: the Last Man” issues 1-5 written by Brian K. Vaughan, penciled by Pia Guerra, inked by José Marzán, Jr, colored by Pamela Rambo, lettered by Clem Robins, with original series covers by JG Jones. Originally published by Vertigo/DC beginning September 2002.
Arc 1: “Unmanned”
Issue 1: A Near Perfect First Issue
Behind the JG Jones cover that teases a scared Yorick in his strait jacket with Ampersand on his back against design images of DNA and chemical compounds contrasting with old European plague illustrations…
the story opens with a really tough image. A Brooklyn mother desperate for help, covered in the blood of her little boys, seeks aid to no avail from a police officer who informs her and us: “all the men are dead.”
Rather than an exposition about the virus accompanied by birds-eye panoramas or disaster collages, we open with a tight close-up. The widening gyre of cognizance of what’s happened begins on the face of a single individual woman. The whole first issue— even this first page— demonstrates the storytelling nugget that we readers can muster little empathy for masses or crowds, so anything that happens writ large, we need to understand through the eyes of a representative few.
Within one page, the nightmare scenario for one person expands into the dawning realization between two that the world’s men— all of them— have died suddenly.
The tonal shift in the subsequent 2-page spread is also a sign of what’s to come throughout the series. Comic creators and screenwriters have terms for this, I’m sure, but from a reader perspective, I always like to call it “dosing.” We need a dose of levity to go with our dose of reality. Vaughan consistently shows in his writing that multi-purposed dosing is his great gift. At the same time that he’s dosing out tone and balancing wit with pathos or suspense with payoffs, he is also progressing characterization, plot threads, tension setups. Vaughan succeeds more often than most in dovetailing those together.
Thus, as much as Yorick’s Houdini (or Hardeen-y) upside-down-ness is a character intro of gleeful inanity, and as immediately as Beth’s outback trekking shouts twenty-somethings freedom… we are already on the clock.
“Twenty-Nine Minutes Ago” heads the whole spread, which makes all this goofy Yorick joking about not being “some phone sex whore” or “kickin’ it Ramen-noodle style” as he squirms out of the strait jacket… all of it is laden with portent, funny but ominous as heck.
If there’s a critique about this first issue, a masterclass in plotting and set up, it’s that the various women we focus on are each somewhat one-note in their scenes. As true of Beth as any of them. We’ll get more layers later with all of the women main characters— part of the premise’s brilliance for a team of mostly (outside Guerra) male-identified creators in the early 2000s is almost forcing the maker’s hand to have multi-faceted women characters, although less of it passes the Bechdel test than you’d think.
In hindsight, the seeding of Yorick’s sister Hero, our introduction to his congressional representative mother Jen Brown, our brief glimpses of Alter Tse’elon the Israeli soldier (for now) or 355 and Secretary (for now) Hamad or Dr. Allison Mann… in hindsight, we know we’re getting the groundwork for the significant characters later.
But for now, in this first issue, they serve as more representatives of the general notion, as we swirl in towards the devastating moment “NOW” when death strikes genetic Y-carriers throughout the world, that this hits everyone, everywhere, all at once. I’m struck that when it hits, when all the males around the world die, my memory of the event is that it stretches much longer than the four pages of widescreen panels in which it happens. That’s the effect of the issue’s focused build-up of its momentousness, and we only need to catch the culmination with our four now-semi-familiar POV characters, then a montage of scenes that stand in for “everywhere around the world,” and then back again to our desperate principals, including the Chekhov’s gun at the temple of the police officer we met on page 1, resounding in a BANG that cuts off Yorick’s call with Beth, Ampersand clutching in fear.
Re-reading it, I’m impressed how much this first issue works on its own, combining form and function to dose out the balanced tones of the whole series, and still from a hindsight perspective of the whole run, effectively introduces our main protagonists and an inkling of their motivations. All constructed within a time-hopping countdown structure that gives each scene delicious overlays of devastating apocalyptic tension.
Issues 2-5: Setting the Rules (and Who Rules)
The premise laid, the next four issues time jump to two months later and establish some ground rules of the post-cataclysm world. Here again, I’m impressed upon the re-read how fast it goes, faster than my memory, because the story wastes no time showing the road when we can infer how we got there from the set pieces we dwell for just a bit in.
At the open of issue 2, it’s Yorick with a gas mask— doubling as disaster signifier and disguise— and the body-collecting sanitation worker. Yorick’s of-the-times-but-still-cringy dropping a slur for trans people reminds us just where we are in a relatively mainstream/relatively edgy comic’s consciousness of gender and sexuality. But the moment distills what’s to come throughout the arc: propulsive and entwined character-and-plot momentum that also sets up the rules of this new world.
Here’s a summary of how the threads interweave:
Post-Y society hangs between every-woman-for-herself and re-formed institutions, affiliations, coalitions, constructed by different/conflicting groups of women across the literal and figurative obstructed highways littered with abandoned remains (cars and carcasses) of the dead men.
Yorick finds his mother, Congresswoman Jen Brown, and the President sends him & 355 on a mission to find Allison Mann for a Science Reason. (Even as I write that, I’m shaking my head at the nameplay: 355 is a historical Culper Ring reference, and I left out but also included Ampersand in the ampersand, and I also notice that I wrote they’re on a mission to find “All Is On Man.”)
Rampant rogue forces including the rebel Republican wives and the Daughters of Amazon cult (netting Hero, Yorick’s sister) also dot the journey across the country that Yorick & 355 and Dr. Mann must take (for Science Reasons), because what’s a post-apocalyptic story without a Road?
Contrasting with those loose threats looms the Israeli defense forces reassembling and marshaled with military efficiency under Alter Tse’elon, and for some reason in commando pursuit of Yorick as well, representing the contest of authorities that will want to lay claim on the last man on earth. Whatever their motives.
Of course, most of that is the live background to what’s in the foreground: Yorick the quippy and dorky romantic, submitting to a bigger plan and subsuming his dreams of Beth; 355 and Allison Mann playing their parts as protector and scientist while saddled with the weight of the world; Hero in inner turmoil with her newfound fanaticism and the revelation that her prey is her brother. And Ampersand, still hurling poop.
I keep thinking as I read that there’s a version of masculinity in this series that’s very circa 2002, still quite familiar now but also pretty warmed over and getting… stinky. Time to not front, I’m 40 now and I was 22 or so when “Y” launched. I’d just begun teaching professionally, and it was War on Terror, Training Day and O Brother Where Art Thou, and Governor Schwarzenegger. Critiques of toxic masculinity and popularizations of Judith Butler ideas and the like were already disseminated in arts and academia, but not kitchen-table familiar in these pre-social media days.
That context surfaces as I read bits like the joke above about Yorick’s manhood, or as I take in how it feels to revisit the repeated trope underlying the rules set in these issues, so much a part of the book’s fascination: masculinity sans men. Subtly, what’s supposed to pique us in these first two issues are the easy and necessary fill-ins that contrast expectations: sanitation worker is a stereotypically attractive woman, and then Secret Service tough and next President in succession, then biker gang, then Israeli military cabal, and so on. I remember the feel of it in 2002 wasn’t “oh, here’s a wacky upside-down world where women who would never play these roles now get to.” It felt actually more like that difficult feeling of the apocalyptic we’re going through now: an accelerant for what was already happening in the world.
Even then I knew that, for how forward-thinking this story might’ve been, it was still by no means a womanist or gynocentric view of the world, but still felt quite androcentric, if somehow “enlightened.” Not only because Yorick stays the main character, the tease and terror of what it’d be like to be the last man on earth at the premise’s fulcrum. But also because the explorations of womanhood still seem to revolve around their donning of roles and characteristics typically marked as “male” somehow. That’s the fascination: hey, look at these gun-toting, motorcycle-straddling, laboratory-burning women!
Yet I respected it then and I respect it still now (keeping in mind it’s 2002) that the storytellers develop dimension and depth to the women leads of the story, like 355, Allison Mann, and even Hero Brown. Even in these early scenes, the gangs and cults of women we meet scan like believable factions of varying plausible reactions, instead of like crazed, irrational, and undifferentiated mobs of women enthralled by the H-word (that’s hysteria).
I’ll save for later more discussion about Yorick himself and how he emblematizes the quandaries of masculinity in that time period. But I’ll just note here: the jokes. The puns. The card tricks and antics. There feels like a thread of Smirking White Guy that ranges on a spectrum that might include Jon Stewart on one end (Daily Show, not Lantern) and maybe Logan Paul on the other (I don’t really know who Logan Paul is, I’m just reaching here). Their self-perceived public service is a dosing of humor and a sincerity worn on the sleeves, but all seemingly deflecting from an impossible-to-ignore semi-awareness that the norm of the world where they’re at the center is exactly the problem, a problem they cannot extricate themselves from.
More in a couple days. Thanks for reading with me! Subscribers, I’d love it if you commented your comments in the Comments!