Y the last Man (spoilery)
First of all, I got to say I absolutely love the concept of this graphic novel. The idea is that due to some sort of magical mishap/breaking the covenent with a god, every male mammal died, nearly instantly -- except for two: Yorick and his Monkey. The two of them wander across the countryside aided and hampered by the women who are left, in search for the guys hot fiance who was last seen in traveling in the Australian Outback. Yorick is a nice dude and an escape artist, which comes in quite handy the times he gets caught.
There are lots of gun fights and things that go boom. Yorick is amiable, and his friends are kick ass. And there's some horrid gangs out there who are trying to kill him because they think that god wanted men dead for a reason. It's a good, fun, exciting read.
Honestly, my quibbles with this series have to do with the fact that this wonderful concept was written by a guy. It has the same problem in reverse that many slash novels have: The women don't behave like women. They behave like men with female bodies.
In a way, find this fascinating, because it gives me insight into the male psyche and what makes guys different in the way they think from women. I look at this concept and see what I would have done with it and the differences become obvious.
In a disaster scenerio, most women like me are primarily concerned with the goal of re-achieving normality. It's the highest priority. Stemming the disaster so it doesn't continue, then making sure that everything works. For women what makes this interesting is how people come together and work and create a new society together. For women the most exciting part is the opportunity the disaster affords for people who would not ordinarily interact with each other to find and form alliances, friendships and love in an "us against the universe" kind of kum-ba-yah.
Apparently, this bores the crap out of guys, because this factor, while desirable in real life disasters, is generally ignored. If it's mentioned at all, it's only in the most passing way. Mostly it's implied. And sometimes it's downright denied.
For men the most interesting part seems to be the opportunity afforded by the disaster for people to prove their worth by fighting other in a no-holds barred, no consequences, life or death battle. No emasculating laws -- no worries about the future -- just pure guts and grit and luck of the moment. People fight over territory, food, resources, you name it. The friendships that form are more implied by them working together for a goal rather than by any particular interaction between them, and the sides aren't firm. Your ally might turn on you and your enemy might join your camp. The ultimate goal is survival in a world where everyone and everything is trying to kill you.
Unfortunately, the guy way of thinking really doesn't work that well with this scenario because it leads to things which plotwise make no fucking sense.
First of all, there is the utter breakdown of law. I hate to be sexist about this, but testosterone poisoning is not generally a problem with women. Women don't commit violent crimes at the same rate guys do. And when they do, it's not usually directed towards strangers. They attack loved ones and they attack for profit. So given a world filled with women and no men, they aren't going to go around being macho. When there is an excess of males in a population it can be a problem and lead to wars, but when there is an excess of women in a population that leads to... nothing much in particular.
The Amazons with their masochistic symbolic mutilation and lack of any plan to better the world would just not be very attractive to a women looking for direction -- unless they delivered something practical, which they don't appear to be doing, they are simply a bunch of worthless assholes making life worse for everyone else. While I can see that they might think that god was punishing men, I can't imagine the majority of women tolerating the group once they started destroying the sperm banks and the possibility of species survival. From a woman's point of view, they aren't doing anything cool or admirable.
Then there is this perplexing thing where Yorick is actually far more unwanted than he is wanted. This is flat out weird. I fully expected every woman who met him to either try to seduce him, or offer him up to their friends who would want to seduce him. Instead the women he meets seem strangely unattracted to him. They don't appear to know how to seduce him, and seem to be waiting for him to make the first move. I fully expected the first time he was revealed to be a guy in public that he'd have a horde of women trying to tear off his clothes (thus justifying why he wears the gas mask), but when he does reveal himself, they seem only mildly surprised and stunned into inactivity. Yorick isn't afraid of women ... for apparently good reason in this universe. Rape doesn't even occur to any of them and they consistently treat him as an equal (or even a better), instead of a powerless but valuable resource.
While there is a nod towards Yorick being used as a mobile sperm bank -- there is no action towards this goal. And the two other men who survived are actually shot down because they'd rather prevent these guys from being used to inseminate women, as if it would be better that no children were born than children in another country are born. This would be video game logic, which assumes that a) the men can't be stolen, b) the children can't be stolen and c) even with women running the show they'd rather indulge in "winning" and "losing" rivalries rather than seek cooperation to insure mutual survival. And then when insemination is mentioned to be going on, it appears the guy is actually having sex with women rather than in vitro fertilization, which would be much more efficient (but I guess less fun). The guy could get a disease! What were these women thinking?
Which leads me mentioning a kind of rampant incompetence. These women don't appear to be able to fly a plane or drive a trash truck or even hold a gun without accidentally shooting someone. The space administrations women can't seem to band together to get people down from space. The chick astronaut can't save her fellow male astronauts. Also why the hell are they landing that sucker on land rather than in the ocean? Yorick's mother can't run the government, the police don't appear to even exist. Agent 355 doesn't make the connection to taking the artifact out of the country with the instant death of all men everywhere. No one is trying to figure out what killed the men... on and on... It's hard to find any woman who is capable of doing something useful and practical.
I think a lot of this problem stems from the fact that the writer isn't comfortable writing people who are not in conflict with each other, so he manufactures unnecessary conflicts in order for the people to have an excuse to interact. Even Yorick's relationship with his fiance is established with a single phone call. It came as a complete surprise to me that Agent 355 was in love with him. If she hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known.
There's a lot of potential here, but to see it, there really needs to be some development of relationships and the backstory rather than just the glossing over of them to get to the fight scenes.
There are lots of gun fights and things that go boom. Yorick is amiable, and his friends are kick ass. And there's some horrid gangs out there who are trying to kill him because they think that god wanted men dead for a reason. It's a good, fun, exciting read.
Honestly, my quibbles with this series have to do with the fact that this wonderful concept was written by a guy. It has the same problem in reverse that many slash novels have: The women don't behave like women. They behave like men with female bodies.
In a way, find this fascinating, because it gives me insight into the male psyche and what makes guys different in the way they think from women. I look at this concept and see what I would have done with it and the differences become obvious.
In a disaster scenerio, most women like me are primarily concerned with the goal of re-achieving normality. It's the highest priority. Stemming the disaster so it doesn't continue, then making sure that everything works. For women what makes this interesting is how people come together and work and create a new society together. For women the most exciting part is the opportunity the disaster affords for people who would not ordinarily interact with each other to find and form alliances, friendships and love in an "us against the universe" kind of kum-ba-yah.
Apparently, this bores the crap out of guys, because this factor, while desirable in real life disasters, is generally ignored. If it's mentioned at all, it's only in the most passing way. Mostly it's implied. And sometimes it's downright denied.
For men the most interesting part seems to be the opportunity afforded by the disaster for people to prove their worth by fighting other in a no-holds barred, no consequences, life or death battle. No emasculating laws -- no worries about the future -- just pure guts and grit and luck of the moment. People fight over territory, food, resources, you name it. The friendships that form are more implied by them working together for a goal rather than by any particular interaction between them, and the sides aren't firm. Your ally might turn on you and your enemy might join your camp. The ultimate goal is survival in a world where everyone and everything is trying to kill you.
Unfortunately, the guy way of thinking really doesn't work that well with this scenario because it leads to things which plotwise make no fucking sense.
First of all, there is the utter breakdown of law. I hate to be sexist about this, but testosterone poisoning is not generally a problem with women. Women don't commit violent crimes at the same rate guys do. And when they do, it's not usually directed towards strangers. They attack loved ones and they attack for profit. So given a world filled with women and no men, they aren't going to go around being macho. When there is an excess of males in a population it can be a problem and lead to wars, but when there is an excess of women in a population that leads to... nothing much in particular.
The Amazons with their masochistic symbolic mutilation and lack of any plan to better the world would just not be very attractive to a women looking for direction -- unless they delivered something practical, which they don't appear to be doing, they are simply a bunch of worthless assholes making life worse for everyone else. While I can see that they might think that god was punishing men, I can't imagine the majority of women tolerating the group once they started destroying the sperm banks and the possibility of species survival. From a woman's point of view, they aren't doing anything cool or admirable.
Then there is this perplexing thing where Yorick is actually far more unwanted than he is wanted. This is flat out weird. I fully expected every woman who met him to either try to seduce him, or offer him up to their friends who would want to seduce him. Instead the women he meets seem strangely unattracted to him. They don't appear to know how to seduce him, and seem to be waiting for him to make the first move. I fully expected the first time he was revealed to be a guy in public that he'd have a horde of women trying to tear off his clothes (thus justifying why he wears the gas mask), but when he does reveal himself, they seem only mildly surprised and stunned into inactivity. Yorick isn't afraid of women ... for apparently good reason in this universe. Rape doesn't even occur to any of them and they consistently treat him as an equal (or even a better), instead of a powerless but valuable resource.
While there is a nod towards Yorick being used as a mobile sperm bank -- there is no action towards this goal. And the two other men who survived are actually shot down because they'd rather prevent these guys from being used to inseminate women, as if it would be better that no children were born than children in another country are born. This would be video game logic, which assumes that a) the men can't be stolen, b) the children can't be stolen and c) even with women running the show they'd rather indulge in "winning" and "losing" rivalries rather than seek cooperation to insure mutual survival. And then when insemination is mentioned to be going on, it appears the guy is actually having sex with women rather than in vitro fertilization, which would be much more efficient (but I guess less fun). The guy could get a disease! What were these women thinking?
Which leads me mentioning a kind of rampant incompetence. These women don't appear to be able to fly a plane or drive a trash truck or even hold a gun without accidentally shooting someone. The space administrations women can't seem to band together to get people down from space. The chick astronaut can't save her fellow male astronauts. Also why the hell are they landing that sucker on land rather than in the ocean? Yorick's mother can't run the government, the police don't appear to even exist. Agent 355 doesn't make the connection to taking the artifact out of the country with the instant death of all men everywhere. No one is trying to figure out what killed the men... on and on... It's hard to find any woman who is capable of doing something useful and practical.
I think a lot of this problem stems from the fact that the writer isn't comfortable writing people who are not in conflict with each other, so he manufactures unnecessary conflicts in order for the people to have an excuse to interact. Even Yorick's relationship with his fiance is established with a single phone call. It came as a complete surprise to me that Agent 355 was in love with him. If she hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known.
There's a lot of potential here, but to see it, there really needs to be some development of relationships and the backstory rather than just the glossing over of them to get to the fight scenes.