As someone fairly new to comics, I’ve been mainly sticking to picking up the classics first and only venturing into modern fare to read Buffy Season 8 and Angel: After the Fall, but that is of course out of fanboy love for Joss Whedon’s seminal TV shows. But one comic is being routinely mentioned in the same breath as established classics, appearing on lists alongside Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as a must have. Well, I’m 5 trades in, and I gotta say, people are right about Y: The Last Man.

Y: The Last Man reads like a film, and it’s the best and most thoughtful piece of science fiction since perhaps Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Brian K. Vaughan wastes no time crafting a surprisingly personal science fiction story seemingly effortlessly: he uses the plague to highlight the jarring gender gap in major positions (spouting out figures like 95% of all American plots were male, almost all local and federal government officials, etc.) but also has a lot of humor strewn about (converting the a phallic monument into a memorial for the men lost made me laugh for minutes on end).

**more after the jump**

The first volume of the ten-trade story, Unmanned, opens in a panic with the proclamation “All the men are dead,” and promptly flashes back a half hour. We are briefly introduced to a young escape artist named Yorick Brown, his paramedic sister, his Congressional rep mother, his girlfriend in Australia, and his wild Capuchin helper monkey Ampersand. We also meet a female Israeli colonel, Alter; the geneticist Dr. Mann, who is at a hospital trying to deliver her baby; and 355, a mysterious government agent on a mission in Jordan. The characters are all briefly introduced before the comic gets back to present time and we see every male mammal on Earth suddenly cough up blood and die. All except Yorick and Ampersand, that is.

As with any first entries in a series, Unmanned is primarily about setting up a story, introducing a few adversaries (the ultra-feminist Daughters of the Amazon being the primary antagonists of this and the second arcs), and just generally creating a world. I suppose that makes this by default the weakest entry that I’ve read so far, but I can assure you that, if this is the weakest the series has to offer, that Y: The Last Man is better at its “lowpoint” than most comics ever are at their peak.

The second arc, entitled Cycles, shows Yorick, Dr. Mann, and 355 traveling across country to get to Mann’s genetics laboratory in San Francisco. Of course, the sudden death of every male- at rush hour, no less- has made transportation difficult, to say the least. So, they hop a train like Depression-era hobos and set off. But if things ever went right we’d have a much shorter series, and, through a series of unfortunate events, wind up in a small town in Ohio.

The town seems like paradise; thus far we’ve been shown only ruins and panic, yet these women have got running electricity, water, and are just plain calm. Yorick even gets close to one of the inhabitants, testing his faithfulness to his girlfriend but at least finally addresses the issue that it’s absurd that the last man on Earth isn’t tempted. Once again, in the world of drama, if something seems too good to be true, it is, and the townspeople have a dark secret. It inevitably comes out, and our hero must decide how to take the news. This type of story is nothing new, but Vaughan takes a romantic comedy cliché and makes it all its own.

Overall, these two arcs must get through the perfunctory introductions and devote an entire story to a plot that is essentially clichéd, yet there’s nothing normal and hackneyed about these stories. Vaughan injects a liberal amount of satire and pop culture references, yet never loses focus. He also keeps the characters from becoming boring and one-dimensional. For example, characters label the violent, ultra-feminist Daughters of the Amazon as nothing more than crazed lesbians, but no evidence is ever given to suggest that they are just one-note man-haters; in fact, they don’t seem to be lesbian at all (or at least not all of them). Vaughan refuses to pigeonhole his characters, and it makes them all the more interesting.

He’s also a master of the cliffhanger ending, to the point that, if I had been reading this from the start and had to wait a month between issues, I’d have suffered a nervous breakdown. Damn near every single issue of the comic ends either in a huge reveal or on the verge of something big, and they never grown tired or forced. And of all of them (in these volumes or any of the others), the only one I’ve ever guessed is who was on the phone with Alter (you’ll find out). The rest have been gasp-worthy twists and nail-biting conclusions.

The apocalypse rarely looked so pretty.

Also not to be left out is the stunning art from Pia Guerra. Her nearly-realistic artwork and in particular her attention to facial detail is so incredible that not even Vaughan’s stellar writing can outshine it. The two make a fantastic team; Vaughan knows when to leave a character’s inflection and tone up to the art, and often Guerra moves the story forward as much as Vaughan’s tightly paced scripts. In short, this team is as intuitive and perfectly matched as maybe any writer/penciller team since Loeb/Sale.

Out of all the maxiseries and ongoing series I’ve read, I’ve never come across a book so captivating and immersing from the start as Y: The Last Man. As somewhat of a comics newbie I can with experience say this, despite being void of supermen, capes, and Goddamn Batmen, should be one of the first series you read along with all the classic stories. The first two arcs not only set up a genius plot, but divert away in a manner that doesn’t seem like a distraction. It shifts quickly to a more personal viewpoint, and in doing so saves the story from potentially stagnating as something that would be more interesting as an episode of The Twilight Zone rather than a continuing series. It only gets stronger and stronger and I literally can’t put a volume down when I open it.