DC Vertigo
Creators: Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan Jr., Paul Chadwick, Goran Parlov and Goran Sudzuka
Release date: July 2002 – January 2008
I’ve been on a bit of an unplanned Vertigo kick of late.
Now, I’ve never been a stranger to Vertigo titles. I started buying Fables while it was still in the midst of its first story arc and continued to buy the title in single issues throughout its entire run. I read the entire run of Transmetropolitan in trade form shortly after the series ended. I’ve also read a number of limited series and tried various issues of other titles released under the DC Vertigo imprint through the years. Some I’ve liked. Some I’ve really enjoyed. Others were simply meh.
But I unexpectedly decided to try reading Preacher for the first time not long ago after hearing the series recommended on a podcast I was listening to. You can read about my first impressions of that title here, if you haven’t already done so.
Since writing that post, I have finished reading all of Preacher, including the various one-shots and the Saint of Killers miniseries. Overall, I continued to enjoy the read-through, and hold the series in very high regard. I especially like how Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon make you care about the characters and root for them as they move along their respective journeys, even though they are not very likeable people. Even the protagonists in the story do things that I would otherwise find abhorrent and despicable, but I still wanted those protagonists to come out on top in the end.
Speaking of the end, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the ending of that series. After liking and rooting for those protagonists through some seventy-plus comic issues, they didn’t exactly end up where I might have hoped they would. That’s not to say I think the writing was bad or faulty. The ending just left me unsure of how I feel about it.
My family has also recently watched and very much enjoyed the entire first season of “Sweet Tooth” on Netflix. I’ve never read the Vertigo title by Jeff Lemire in any form. But I’d heard some good reviews of the show by friends online, and my wife had heard many of the same positive reviews. We decided to try the show and were pleasantly surprised by just how much we enjoyed it. We definitely plan to watch the announced second season when it drops.
And that brings us, finally, to Y: The Last Man. I read the Transmet trades in late 2002 or early 2003, shortly after that series ended. Just before Transmet came to an end, Y: The Last Man began publishing. I decided to buy it in trades, but I also decided to wait until the series ended and I had the complete story before I would read it. That’s how I’d read Spider Jerusalem’s story; I figured it would work well for Yorick Brown, too. I bought each of the Y: The Last Man trades as they were released, and then I put them on the pile of books to read later, after I collected the entire thing.
I bought the series based on liking Transmet, so it seemed fitting to decide now was the time to read it after reading and liking another Vertigo title, Preacher. There was also the incentive of reading the entire series before it, too, becomes a streaming television program. “Y: the Last Man” the TV series is set to debut on the FX network next month, I believe. So I have spent the past couple weeks reading all 60 issues of Y.
Like the characters in Preacher, the people readers meet in Y: The Last Man are flawed individuals who do not always do the right thing. But I still found myself liking the main protagonists, being drawn into their world and rooting for them through all the twists and turns of their story.
The set-up for the story is a mysterious plague which immediately kills every mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome — every one except for a young man named Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The other principals in the story include Hero Brown, Yorick’s older sister and an EMT when the pandemic hits; 355, a government agent assigned to protect Yorick as he travels; and Allison Mann, a researcher who thinks she might be able to find a way to counter the effects of the pandemic with Yorick’s and Ampersand’s help. The story follows their adventures as they seek answers and solutions in the world that remains.
Of course, there are many, many more characters in the cast along the way. Our heroes come across hate groups, zealots, soldiers, former supermodels, secret agents, scientists, actors, astronauts, sailors, pirates, spies, journalists, ninjas and many others in their travels to Washington, D.C.; Massachusetts; California; Australia; China; France; and other stops all along the way.
Honestly, I don’t want to give away too many details of the story for anyone who hasn’t read the books or who plans to watch the upcoming FX program. Overall, Y: The Last Man was a fun, enjoyable read. Brian K. Vaughan writes an engaging tale that kept me riveted page after page. Primary artist Pia Guerra’s work is a nice mix of realistic and cartoony, and the fill-in artists, when used, produce a similar style, giving the entire series a uniform, cohesive look.
I’m glad I finally made time to give this title a try, and I’m looking forward to seeing what FX does with the streaming series. Once again, I had a bit of an issue with the ending of the series. I was not entirely happy with how some things turned out, including the explanation(s) of what exactly caused the plague which killed most male mammals on Earth. But I will say I liked the ending of this title a bit more than I did the ending of Preacher. And I have no problem recommending the series to anyone interested in giving it a read.
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