Long Read: "Y: the Last Man" part 1.2 (issues 6-10) by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, & Jose Marzán Jr.
Sorry my homework is a day (or two) late!
Welcome back to our first “Long Reads” on the Comics Syllabus Substack! This is the second half of Part 1 of our reading. You can find the first half (about issues 1-5) here. 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!
The show is out!
If you have FX/Hulu access,, “Y: The Last Man” started streaming on September 13, and three episodes are up for your enjoyment, semi-bingeing, comparison, hot Twitter takes, meme-ifying, etc! I’ve only watched the first twenty minutes or so. Reviews seem mixed. That makes me a little sad, since the property is so important to so many fans. But no despair for us who cherish the story we already have…
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
The fork in the road. A comics moment mirrored in the show’s pilot. From “Y: The Last Man” Deluxe Edition v1 p.131 (Vertigo) by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, & Jose Marzán Jr.
Arc 2: “Cycles”
Issue 6-8: Rolling off the Train
The title of this arc, “Cycles,” is again such un-subtle wordplay that I couldn’t tell if there’s a winking self-awareness, like all this is the smirking crassness of Yorick himself, or if we should feel a little insulted. But in addition to the nod to menstrual cycles (like the synced ones of the Marrisville prison town) and motorcycles (like the Amazonian cultists’), is there a claim to literary cycles here as well?
‘Y’ came roughly at the crest of a model of Vertigo storytelling that met with the advent of prestige TV to build out a certain template for longer form, serialized, but not perpetual stories. For some time markers, Y’s 2002 debut was 13 years after “Sandman’s,” three years after “100 Bullets,” and five before “Scalped.” And 2002 saw the fourth season of The Sopranos and the first of The Wire.
Brian K. Vaughan would go on to write, for a time, on Lost, by that point having proven a knack for the story structures that tumble a core of characters through a series of arcs that had self-contained satisfaction but also vaulted toward a larger story. Although those story cycles had many predecessors, from sacred texts to Star Wars, lots of popular entertainment in the 20th century had become either episodic (like “The Simpsons”), perpetually serial (soaps and superheroes), or self-contained (most movies).
I remember my initial reaction to this arc, when I first read it, was to demur a bit because the story seemed to downshift into a lower gear, as if the first salvo of “Unmanned” reached such a quick and successful boil that the creators had to roll into a simmer.
That’s why I’ve bundled issues 6 through 8: major threads still drafting off of the momentum in “Unmanned,” but now slowed to more of a chess game. Our leads, Yorrick, 355, & Dr. Mann (again, the Ampersand is Ampersand) are literally hurtled off the train and into a mysterious and suspiciously utopian town, forming a tiny little bottle where they can both settle/heal AND reposition themselves. Mann calms but starts forming attachments to 355, Yorrick wavers from his Beth-headedness, and 355, the bulletproof agent, is bedridden and vulnerable.
Meanwhile, Marrisville presents a contrast to the Amazonians, who we see continue a both deliberate and impetuous pursuit to eliminate the Last Man, with Hero as the tip of the spear. The Marrisville residents, idyllically self-organized and stocked with civil leal, are ominous in opposite ways. It’s their stillness that’s frightening. While the marauding Daughters of the Amazon, fueled by Victoria’s implacable indoctrination, give every signal that they’ll self-destruct. The suspense is what collateral damage comes.
The three issues come to a head in the one-two-three punch of Yorick and Sonia’s kiss, and her reveal of Marrisville’s truth as an escaped women’s prison, which Yorick blows the lid off, and just then, Hero crashes in, bow in hand, the last-page reveal that ends issue 8.
Rather than space out these climatic moments, smashing them together seems like a storytelling device pretty key to these structures I referred to earlier, to the cyclic, arc-driven longer-form story. If you want to be cynical about these cyclicals, an interruption like Hero’s saves you from having to write the hard (maybe boring?) conversation about why Marrisville should or shouldn’t exist. Rather than resolve any one narrative train, you just crash them all together and make mirth from the aftermath.
But besides avoiding having to resolve Yorick’s ethical debate (this trick will show up later), Hero’s interruption— and the collision of storylines it represents— also paces this arc (or “cycle”) for a more meaningful denouement.
Screenwriters and script doctors talk about three act structures, but to resort to the Shakespeare from whence we get “Yorick,” a comic book arc like this makes more sense with a five act structure. And Shakespeare’s third acts very often contained the collision of threadlines that the story seemed built around. Act 3: Lear goes mad and Cornwall plucks out Gloucester’s eyes and himself dies. Act 3: Tybalt kills Mercutio and in vengeance, Romeo slays Tybalt. Act 3: Banquo murdered, MacBeth haunted. Et cetera.
And by this point, I’d seen enough of the Marrisville tale, and I was eager to get to the point of it. Which we do, brought to you by Hero’s arrow.
Issue 9-10: Arrows, Axes, Arguments, Astronauts
There’s potentially much to unpack about these two issues, but as I argued above, what seems remarkable to me about them is not plot points we could recap, but the extended time we spend in questions and quandaries that show societies negotiating how they remake themselves after a fallout. This is the stuff I love.
As it turns out, the standoff between Victoria’s Amazons and the Marrisville freedpeople in issue 9 doesn’t mount up into a massive battle scene. That’s for another comic. Instead, Victoria rapid fires arguments lofted to persuade the Marrisville unincarcerated that they have even more reason to side with the Amazons than other survivors. I was pretty impressed at how Victoria’s agitprop is finely written, enough to have a plausible ring of alluring truthiness, while sounding so sure that it clearly belies its own off-kilter self-justifying. The art keeps the effect of those speech bombs purposively ambiguous, falling on the steely expressions of these tough women.
But it’s not long before the townsfolk show the stuff they’re made of, which we should’ve known all along but we’re left to second-guess for juuusssst long enough. These aren’t the suckers for the white-collar hucksterism that Victoria’s peddling.
And Sonia’s last heroic bow before Hero’s fast, panicked bow (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist) sets off a chain of self-sacrificing nobility that squares the moral circularities of the story:
Victoria, dared, prepares to end the surrendering last man, when suddenly, with a “thunk,” we discover her axed face, and follow Yorick’s eyes (p.219) to Sonia the thrower, precipitating down the page (as Victoria falls) to Hero’s impetuous response, the arrow to the heart that ends Sonia. It’s melodrama, and frankly, it works.
What ensues, I won’t do the blow-by-blow. But issue 9 ends with the new moral quandary of whether Hero deserves a revenge execution, which snowballs into the central tension of issue 10. Where do we go from here? What do these Amazon murderers deserve, debate the Marrisville women.
Again, in the fashion of this story that prefers to raise questions without having to resolve them, the moral debate about what punishment befits Hero and the Amazons gets interrupted. As Dr. Mann recalls the laboratory-burning crime to add to their offenses, Hero claims that’s untrue, opening the door for the further intrigue of the Israeli Defense pursuers and then, eventually, the farther-off morsel (literally “220 Miles above Earth”) of the astronaut Y-carriers deciding to return to earth.
These teases of the plot ahead, though, sit side-by-side with our settling in to the new status quo for our mains: Yorick cuts his hair and his boyish act; 355 wakes up chastened with responsibility; Hero uses her brother’s tricks to escape plot prison and re-insert herself later; and we hear incidentally what Marrisville ultimately decided, a pragmatic compromise of releasing prisoners as it made the most just sense to do so. It’s a hopeful bit of logic, actually, a contrast to the draconian US prison system that even 355 decried.
But to literalize and visualize what’s become emotionally true, the trio& leave Marrisville… on a train. They resume the trek after their sojourn, changed. This arc’s denouement becomes the next cycle’s starting point.
Alright, folks. Join us next week for “Y: The Last Man” Deluxe Edition v2 (or TPBs 3 and 4, or issues 11-23).
Whew! Pretty sapped from this writing. Forgive the typos and errors that probably litter this piece. And if you’ve gotten some gain from reading with me, would you consider becoming a supporter of the Comics Syllabus? Maybe I’m silly, off of one listener’s suggestion, to launch a whole reading project, writing for hours, without any certainty that anyone’s paying attention. But your support would go a long way to quiet those doubts.
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