Y: The Last Man

I’m part way through reading a really excellent graphic novel entitled “Y: The Last Man.” I’ve never been a fan of the more traditional style comic books, but this steers clear of superhero cliches and the traditional clunky expository style speeches. Instead it reads more like a clever hip TV show, with funny snappy dialog and sly cultural references.

The premise is that every man (and male animal) drops dead at exactly the same time, leaving only those people without a Y chromosome alive. The only exception is a single young man named Yorick and his pet male monkey. What follows is the story of his quest to find his girlfriend (he’s in the US, she’s in Australia), while the 3B remaining women in the world try and deal with the aftermath of this cataclysmic event.

The author has obviously had a lot of fun thinking about some of the less obvious effects of such a societal shift. The obvious male dominated fields like engineering and law enforcement are clearly going to be a problem. But what about politics? There are comparatively few female politicians, and most of those are from the Democratic party (in the US). So by default the Democrats end up in charge, which doesn’t sit well with the surviving wives of the Republican politicians. The military is another male dominated area, with the exception of Israel, which conscripts and trains women and men. Israel is therefore vaulted into the forefront as a military power, something they’re not slow to take advantage of. There series is full of such intriguing ideas, most of which are great illustrations of just how unequally divided the world still is.

For the most part the books do a good job of subverting the obvious sexual expectations of being the only man on a planet full of women. Yorick spends most of his time hiding and trying not to be killed or kidnapped, rather than trying to repopulate the planet. But there’s one interesting sub-plot where he has an encounter with an aggressive and apparently dominant woman. Things don’t play out exactly as you might expect from these two front page shots, but it adds an entertaining erotic twist into a plot that’s already fairly unusual from a gender and sexual point of view.