Y: The Last Man Vol 2: Cycles

Y: The Last Man Vol 2: Cycles 

Brian K Vaughan, Pia Guerra & José Marzán (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84023-728-7

When a plague killed every male on Earth, only Yorick Brown and his pet monkey survived in a world utterly female. With a government agent and a geneticist escorting across the devastated American continent to a Californian bio-lab all the young man can think of is re-uniting with his girlfriend, trapped in Australia when the disaster struck.

The second volume picks up as the trio end up in a curiously stable community in the Midwest where the sight of a male hardly seems to ruffle the assembled feathers, and consequently presents Yorick with his first instance of genuine sexual temptation. Sadly, the idyll is short lived as the Amazons catch up to the wanderers there, with tragic results.

The ongoing soap-opera tone burgeons in this comparatively ill-paced and sluggish volume and a faint “cliff-hanger” air starts to descend over everything. Israeli commandos are hunting for the last sperm-donor on Earth. There’s lots of lip service paid to the type of society the world would be without most of its pilots, entrepreneurs, mechanics, labourers and violent felons but there’s precious little story progression.

The volume even ends with a classic shock cliff-hanger. That might be acceptable for a periodical (these stories first saw print in issues #6-10 of the monthly comic) but is quite unsatisfactory for a collected volume and somewhat defeats the purpose of using these collections to lure non-collectors back to the fold and create a new readership.

 © 2003 Brian K Vaughan & Pia Guerra. All Rights Reserved.