Y: The Last Man
Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra
2002- (read 6 books so far, out of 9 or 10)
Everyone seems to love this, so I’m relieved that I like it pretty well. All the males in the world drop dead except this one schlub, Yorick; the world carries on, sort of; Yorick is on the run looking for his girlfriend; various people think they know what’s really going on; cultists and pirates and spies, oh my. It’s a lot of fun, I just wish it were better.
Vaughan is ambitious for sure. It seems like he’s been wanting for years to write science fiction and romance and sociology and secret agents and ninjas, and he picked a pretty good excuse to throw them all in. He keeps coming up with non-obvious corollaries to the removal of men (Israel now has the largest army; there are almost no Republicans in Congress; etc.), and he’s also got a big stash of interesting facts you should know, which some character happens to mention every so often - it’s clumsy, there might as well be a “Today’s Lesson” caption, but it all more or less fits. And keeping half a dozen subplots in the air at once lets him cut to somewhere else whenever things slow down.
That said - he writes really, really cheesy dialogue. Yorick spouts one-liners every ten seconds, like everyone under 40 does on TV; eventually Vaughan fills in a little background for why he seems so stupid, but still. The evil cult leader is so unconvincing that Vaughan had to make up a hilarious coincidence to explain how one of the main characters instantly fell under her spell. Nitpickers will find more to complain about—my main beef was that no “plague” would kill billions of people at the very same second, which Vaughan obviously knows (as of book 6, he’s still playing with the mystery of what the hell happened) but almost no one in the book figures out.
Pia Guerra’s art is OK, and has more attention to details of real-world things and places than in most adventure titles these days, but it’s kind of bland: there’s a generic Hollywood look to a lot of the people, and almost no use of shadow. It gets more interesting after the first few books.
Blade of the Immortal
Hiroaki Samura
1994- (read 2 books so far, out of like a zillion)
Well done, I guess, but really not my thing. The details of the cynical antihero’s curse of immortality are sort of novel (body parts made out of “blood worms”, and the requirement that he find and kill exactly one thousand bad guys) but the fight scenes fall into a predictable pattern: bad guy chops off hero’s arms/legs/liver, not realizing he’s immortal; bad guy chuckles and turns to go; hero gets up and kills him. Also, samurai intrigue for its own sake (renegades from Sword School X form Sword School Y to wipe out all the other sword schools, etc.) is possibly even sillier than superhero intrigue. The art is lovely, although the very gory violence is stylized in a way that just looks odd to me: for instance, people don’t just get stabbed or sliced by swords, they get sliced in half effortlessly like Jello.