Y: The Last Man Vol.1 – Emotional Roller Coaster

Following my co-blogger’s trend, I get back to reviewing graphic novels ! I haven’t done it in such a long time that I figured I might as well do it before forgetting about them you know.

THE PREMISE

The novel starts by introducing us to Yorick, the only guy remaining after a pandemic that kills all the animals that have the chromosome Y. Weirdly enough, only him and his male monkey survived. His mom, Jennifer Brown, is a representative at the White House and while he came to confront her about his survival, the President entrusted him and agent 335 to go find a bioengineer doctor to help understand how he survived and if possible, find a cure.

During their journey, they encountered a few… obstacles. As you can imagine, when all the men die suddenly, women are humans too, they are also power hungry. Chaos reigns.

You can imagine for Yorick being the only male on the planet also means he’s an object to be used by two extreme sides: one, use him to reproduce and make a lot of babies and two, kill him because he’s the last symbol of hope and patriarchy.

WHY IT’S A 4 STARS GRAPHIC NOVEL

I love taking time to read my graphic novels because not only you read the texts, but you have to look at the pictures thoroughly and enjoy the art, kudoo to Pia Guerera! So many details in those panels. But the real strength of Y: The Last Man is that it reads EXACTLY like a novel. The writing style is extremely well-thought and it’s a lot more than we think. It’s political, scientific, an emotional roller coaster and super psychological. I even teared up at a scene. It was brilliant. The characters were compelling and while you may not be attached to Yorick, the secondary characters are all witty and badass women.

Brian K. Vaughan put a lot of research into the statistics and covers about every outcome possible for a situation like this. All the consequences vs advantages and the parties at risk. The fight between powerful leaders getting the wrong ideas into their followers and what they are capable to do to survive.

The advice I would give for women who read this graphic novel is : do not be radical. In a sense, do not suddenly becomes an extreme feminist who thinks that women are above men and get frustrated by little details in this story. Keep in mind it was published in 2002, things were different, yes the woman’s presence in 2002 vs 2018 has changed a lot.

A TV SERIES IS IN DEVELOPMENT

FX announced the cast of the main characters for the Y: The Last Man and they also started to film the pilot already, can’t wait!

“It was important to me that we do something where people can’t go online and read how this ends or what’s going to happen next,” says Vaughan. “If you’re a fan of the comic, you’re going to be surprised. If you’ve never read the comic, you’re going to be surprised.”

Diane Lane as Jennifer Brown

Barry Keoghan as Yorick Brown

Big thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the review copy ! ❤