Another solid read no longer delayed

Y: The Last Man
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.

They were right; this IS a worthwhile read

Preacher Vol. 1: Gone to Texas (collecting issue Nos. 1-7 of the original series)
DC/Vertigo
Creators: Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Release date: March 14, 1996

Strap in, folks; it’s a lengthy post today.

I wasn’t much into Vertigo titles in 1996 when Preacher made its debut on comic store shelves. I was in the thick of buying mostly super-hero titles at the time. I was still holding onto buying New Titans in hopes the title would return to its former glory, and I was, of course, picking up Aquaman and Green Arrow at the time. Nightwing’s solo series had not come along quite yet, but most of the other Bat-books were on my pull list, including Robin. I was a regular buyer of the Superman titles at the time. Other DC titles I was grabbing included Damage, Darkstars, Deathstroke, Flash, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, Legionnaires, Showcase and Wonder Woman. I was also picking up occasional issues of the Spider-Man titles with some regularity, as well as Dark Horse’s Ghost.

That’s not to say I was ignorant of the Vertigo titles. I bought and enjoyed the first several issues of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man before the magazine was even considered a Vertigo title. I was also vaguely aware of Swamp Thing, Sandman and Hellblazer, several other Vertigo greats. Likewise, shortly after the debut of Preacher, when the title really started to generate some buzz, I’d heard of it and had a simple awareness of the title’s existence. It just wasn’t something I had much interest in.

So why am I reading the title now? Because it came highly recommended. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I also listen to and enjoy a number of fine comics-themed podcasts. I like a number of shows out there and have gotten to know some of the various podcasters through their respective shows and through friending a number of them on Facebook.

I was recently listening to an episode of “Views from the Longbox” by Michael Bailey that featured guest hosts Andrew and Micheal Leyland of “Hey Kids, Comics!” The specific episode was No. 166 from October 15, 2013, and was titled “TC and the Chicken.” On this episode, the three co-hosts discussed the Preacher series in general, and focused specifically on the third story arc, “All In the Family.” All three gentlemen talked about the series in glowing terms.

For instance, Andrew Leyland, while describing the series as “depraved” also said that he followed Ennis and Dillon from Hellblazer to Preacher and considered the pair of creators “one of the best comic book teams ever.”

Leyland continued: “I can see how it wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste, but I think it’s genius. It is the single best piece of work in Vertigo’s history, and one of the best finite comic series ever.”

That’s pretty high praise indeed. And Leyland wasn’t alone in his opinion of the series.

Michael Bailey said, “The strength of the series is Garth Ennis’ ability to have you care about these characters and how he engages you as a reader. Even as messed up as this story can get, at heart, you still like these people and root for them.”

After hearing that kind of praise, I throw the question back: How could I not give it a try?

Again, while these guys talked a lot about the series as a whole in the episode, they focused on the third story arc of the series, specifically issue Nos. 8-12. But I can’t give something a genuine try starting in the middle of the series, so I started with this first trade, collecting the first two story arcs.

I’ve said before that I try to focus this blog on comics that I have enjoyed and can feel good about recommending to someone else. So it should come as no shock to regular readers that I enjoyed this first bit of Preacher very much, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it, and you wouldn’t be reading about it here.

Everybody has to decide for themselves about the level of gore, sex and language they want to accept in the comics they read, but I was expecting something a little more graphic from what I’d heard about the series before reading it. Maybe the series will get worse later on, and maybe my expectations were at a level where what I got in this first trade was not as bad as I feared. But I had no problem with what was shown and what happened “off panel.”

For anyone like myself who had not read Preacher before, the title character is Jesse Custer, a small-town Texas preacher who is suffering a bit of a crisis of faith when something miraculous/disastrous happens to him. Jesse’s transformation leaves him merged with Genesis, an angelic/demonic entity recently escaped from captivity in Heaven. The merger leaves Jesse with the Word of God, the ability to command others to do whatever he says, and they have no ability to resist. The merger of Jesse and Genesis leaves the rest of the town dead.

The death of everyone in a small Texas town brings Jesse to the attention of the police, as well as the Saint of Killers, another supernatural entity sent by Heaven to recapture Genesis. By chance, Jesse is first found by Tulip, a former girlfriend Jesse abandoned five years earlier, and Cassidy, an Irish vampire. Tulip and Cassidy first met the day before when Tulip failed at her initial attempt to pay off some debts by becoming a hitperson. Fleeing the ensuing gunfight, Tulip happens on Cassidy and begs for his help getting away.

The first story arc in the first Preacher trade introduces these three major players and the situation they find themselves in. The three fugitives must first deal with their initial pursuers, the Texas authorities and the Saint of Killers. In the course of doing this, they learn that God has left Heaven, and the three decide to seek out God to have a word with him about his behavior. This leads into the second story arc in the trade: Cassidy leads the trio to New York City, where they meet up with an old friend of his and try to gather intel on God’s possible whereabouts. Instead, they end up running afoul of a serial killer.

To be sure, this is some violent content, and there is plenty of swearing in the dialogue. Many people are killed and/or tortured in the course of these two story arcs, and there is a lot of graphic content some may find more disturbing than others. But again, from all I’d heard, I’d expected much worse than I got. I’ve also read Ennis’ later series, The Boys, which is also very violent and graphic. So Preacher didn’t bother me as much as I expected it might. Your tolerance may vary.

One thing that counters the graphic violence is the series’ sense of humor. Ennis can have a biting, nasty edge to his humor at times, too, to be sure, but there are some genuinely touching and simply humorous moments between the characters in this series, especially between the three leads. Ennis writes them as three-dimensional characters, not cookie-cutter caricatures of real people. The writing is often filled with subtle moments that counter the more over-the-top ones. Michael Bailey and the Leylands also mentioned the subtlety in Ennis’ writing for this series in their review, and I very much agree with that assessment after reading this first trade.

I’d never read Preacher before as it never seemed like a good match for my tastes, but after hearing this podcast enthusiastically recommending people give it a try, I decided to do just that. I enjoyed the first trade as I got to meet these three characters on their initial adventures together, and I’m looking forward to reading the next story arc, which Bailey and the Leylands covered so well in their podcast review, and beyond. If you’ve never read the series either, maybe this post will inspire you, too, to try Preacher.