Brian K Vaughan, Pia Guerra & José Marzán with Paul Chadwick (DC/ Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84023-805-4
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.
Volume 3, collecting issues #11-17 of the monthly comic, begins a meandering progression of shorter tales as the trio make their way across a devastated America and picks up from the previous volume with the eagerly anticipated arrival of astronauts who have avoided plague contamination by the simple expedient of being in space when it struck. Moreover, two of them are hulking great healthy men!
Naturally it is all doomed to go wrong. Filling out the book is a two part story illustrated by Concrete creator Paul Chadwick, which examines the roles of Art and Mass Entertainment on the media (and especially TV) deprived women in a post plague world. It is, perhaps, in such smaller scale stories that Y shows the most potential, so let’s hope it’s a foretaste of things to come.
Ultimately, taken on its merits, Y is a somewhat glib contemporary reworking of a much-explored theme that is perhaps best realised by Philip Wylie in his novel The Disappearance, but it’s readable enough, very well drawn — and it does it all without resorting to coyness or exploitation.
© 2003, 2004 Brian K Vaughan & Pia Guerra. All Rights Reserved.