Y The Last Man Book One – Brian K. Vaughan/Pia Guerra

When I stopped reading comics a few years back, one of the books I was still enjoying was Y The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s tale of Yorrick Brown, the sole survivor of a worldwide episode that left the male of all species dead.  Now that the series has completed, Vertigo re-released the series as deluxe hardcovers, the first of which covers the first 10 issues of the series.

These issues first came out 10 years ago, so despite having read them at the time, I didn’t really remember much about them.  Yorrick Brown, an amateur magician who is training a monkey on the side, is talking to his girlfriend, who is in Australia, when something starts killing men throughout the entire world, leaving Yorrick, and his monkey Ampersand, as the last remaining males on Earth.  These first ten issues focus on Yorrick’s trip to Washington, where his mom is in the senate and he gets assigned to Agent 355 of the Culper Ring, and then to Boston, where he and 355 look for a cloning expert, who fears she is responsible for the plague that killed all of the men.

I’ve had this first edition for a few years now and was waiting for the last edition to come out before I started reading it.  I didn’t want to have to wait for the ending like I did back when I was reading it monthly.  Recently, I went to check on when the latest edition would be released and found out that I got the last volume last year, either for my birthday or Christmas, so I’ve been sitting on the whole collection for nearly a year now.  Having read the first volume, I can see what drew me to the series in the first place.  Vaughan has a tight story going on and Guerra’s pencils are even better than I had remembered.  I imagine I’ll be tearing through the remaining 4 volumes in short order.