It's been a few years, but I can still remember Brian K. Vaughn's plea to buy his new book.
Pre-order the first issue at your comic store, the writer asked on a message board I used to frequent. He even offered refunds to anyone who didn't like "Y: The Last Man."
Really, Vaughn shouldn't have worried.
Post-apocalyptic tales may be a dime a dozen, but he and artist Pia Guerra managed to craft a tale that feels fresh and perhaps a tiny bit too real.
It's summertime, and a mysterious plague instantaneously wipes out every mammal on earth with a Y chromosome - every male, that is, except Yorick Brown.
Oh, and his pet monkey, Ampersand.
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It sounds like a perfect recipe for bad sci-fi melodrama, but the "Y: The Last Man" slightly twists the formula around with the addition of politics, secret agents and international intrigue.
The first issue intersperses a conversation between Yorick and his girlfriend Beth, who is across the world in Australia, with different events involving the series' main players. All the while, the narrative counts down to the plague, slowing building tension.
The story picks up in the second issue in Washington, D.C., two months later. It's taken that long for Yorick to get there from New York.
He's on a mission - well, a pre-mission, really. He treks to the Capitol to find his mother, a Democratic representative from Ohio. After that, he plans to hit Australia to find Beth.
That's when the story turns from a typical post-apocalyptic saga into something a bit more interesting.
Just what would happen to our country if all the men suddenly died?
Three-fourths of the women in Congress are Democrats, which causes tension with the widows of Republican politicians, who want to take their husbands' seats. Supermodels are suddenly out of demand and have to turn to a career in garbage collection.
All of the details show how much work Vaughn put into creating his world, and makes it both more believable and more disturbing.
Guerra's art, with its rich detail and convincing characters, helps flesh out that tone. Yorick's world could be our world. This isn't a made-up place, but a glimpse into what our everyday world would be after such a disaster.
Nothing in "Y" feels hokey or contrived. The characters feel more like real people instead of cardboard sci-fi clichÇs. As a result, you get sucked into the story to see what happens to Yorick and Agent 355 just as much as you do to find out what caused the plague.
"Y: The Last Man" is published monthly by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics. Y: The Last Man: Unmanned collects the first five issues of the series. The next issue, #30, will be released Wednesday.
Post-apocalyptic tales may be a dime a dozen, but he and artist Pia Guerra managed to craft a tale that feels fresh and perhaps a tiny bit too real.
