2726 ( )

I thought this collection was the best yet. I loved all of the back story on the characters we thought we knew well. ( )

Off to Japan to rescue a monkey from a ninja...

Still enjoying this series and look forward to the final two books. ( )

This review is for the entire run of Y: The Last Man, not any single installment.

In an instant all the men, in fact every mammal with a Y chromosome, all around the world are wiped out. Except for one man and his monkey (and yes, the inevitable Beatles joke does eventually get made). That man, Yorick Brown, and his helper capuchin in training, Ampersand, are taken under the protection of a spy/assassin member of a secret organization answerable only to the President of the USA and sent to meet an expert in (human) cloning to try and discover why Yorick survived and how to continue the human species. And incidentally for Yorick to re-unite with his fiancée, last known to be in Australia.

Of course most of the story is about the troubles of being the only remaining man alive in a world that just lost half its population while trying to travel from New York to Boston to California and eventually most of the rest of the world. How would women react? What sorts of communities would they re-build? The short answer is well and badly, communities of hate and communities of inclusion, all with very recognizable human motivations. There are neo-amazons who set out to destroy any vestige of maleness in the world. There are the ex-cons that were let out of prison (what if the female guards hadn't freed them?) who form a community based around shared pasts and a belief in reform, responsibility and independence. Fanatic nationalists, drug smugglers, post-male feminist activist acting troupes.

Throughout the entire run a variety of possible causes ranging from disease, to curses, to divine retribution, to gaia/evolution re-setting a balance are proposed. The thing they all have in common, aside from never being definitively set as "the" cause, is that every single one of them revolves around the incredible hubris that the actions of a single person caused this to happen. Right along side the obvious parallel of the hubris that a single man could "save" the entire human species.

The story is well told, beautifully illustrated, and plays with a whole range of human emotions and motivations in a fairly believable fashion. If it skims past a lot of the practical details and problems, it at least acknowledges them in passing. My biggest problem is that while any given installment contains some time references like "New York, 10 minutes ago" and "Washington D.C., now" the actual timeline of the entire series of chapters (issues? installments?) is not clearly laid out. And it doesn't help that two chapters might take place in immediate succession, or weeks or months apart. That probably worked fine for anyone reading each installment as it came out each month but if you're reading them in collected and straight through it becomes slightly annoying and distracting. ( )