Y: THE LAST MAN – UNMANNED, BY BRIAN VAUGHAN & PIA GUERRA

Sometimes I feel like it’s almost impossible to find a decent comic. Never mind the good stuff, I’m just talking about something that doesn’t suck. The first volume of Y: the Last Man certainly surpasses the Suck, and hints that the series may approach the Good. And to top it all off, it’s science fiction! Praise be!

This premise is this: one day (in the present) all the men die except one, a 20-something English major cum escape artist. Apparently, all the male animals die, too, with the exception of Yorick’s pet capuchin, Ampersand. Yorick has a girlfriend galavanting down under, a congresswoman mother, and a firefighting sister in Boston. Secrecy, intrigue, etc, but the best parts are a) the writing, and b) the speculative bits. The writing is damn fine for a comic, with moments of genuine humor and admirably plausible conversation tangents. And the roving gangs of violent hyper-feminists, congressmen’s wives trying to forcibly take their husbands seats, and super models hauling corpses in dump trucks for food are great.

The primary foible here is the art, which is mundane in the extreme. Not that I keep up with comics very well, but I feel that merely competent pencils, inks, and colors do not befit a Vertigo title. Layouts are similarly uninspired. A dream sequence in which Yorick imagines his girlfriend in an Eve-like situation is rendered like laughably bad porn.

Overall, though, I’d recommend picking it up. Who knows, I may love this thing given a few more books.