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| Comic trade paperback, 143 pages Published 2007 (contents: 2006-07) Borrowed from the library Read May 2011 |
Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Pencillers: Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán, Jr., Goran Sudžuka
Colorist: Zylonol
Letterer: Clem Robins
For sheer shock value, the main story of the penultimate book of Y: The Last Man is one of the best of the series. I ain't giving nothing away here, except to say that I think I literally gasped on pages 48 and 51, and the following pages kept up the revelations. There's a lot of answers and explanations, and sometimes it gets convoluted, but it's mostly satisfying. There is an answer of sorts for the plague, but as many reviewers before have pointed out, it's mostly nonsense. It doesn't both me, though, as I never really cared why the plague happened-- as in Mary Shelley's original The Last Man, the answer is unimportant. The plague is just there to reveal things about the characters and the world they/we live in, and it does that spectacularly.
Case in point are the two side stories in this volume, which really worked for me (though one wonders if Vaughan was spinning his wheels a little bit to stretch the whole thing out to sixty issues by putting these just before the climax). "The Obituarist" and "Tragicomic" both show the women, after four years on their own, beginning to build their own post-male world, and they're both good examples of what this series does so well, in trying to suss out what makes women women, and thus men men, and where it all comes from anyway and what we ought to do about it.
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