The travel aspect is helpful because it allows Vaughan to naturally explore a number of different reactions to the cataclysm along with the shifting landscape of their journey. Allison Mann* (a bioengineer who hopes to clone Yorick to preserve the human race), as they traverse the globe (via foot, train, and boat) in search of Yorick’s Beth. The entire scope of the ten-volume series covers approximately five years and follows Yorick as he and his two companions, Agent 355 (an American spy) and Dr. Vaughan presents a world that believably captures both the horror and hope of the human condition.Īnd all the while Yorick is racing from Boston to Australia on a quest to find his would-be fiancée Beth, who was participating in anthropological research in the Outback when the plague hit.

From the ultra-feminist gang who burned all the sperm banks (assuring that the world would never again be plagued with men) to those women who were already involved in the national and internation political scenes prior to the fall of man, author Brian K.

Apart from those women who are simply scrambling to survive in and make sense of this new world, the new society-in-flux has given rise to numerous factions struggling for and abusing power. The second chapter picks up several weeks after the plague hit, revealing a world very much changed. Y: The Last Man begins on July 17, 2002-about a half-hour prior to the great extinction, and introduces Yorick, his pet monkey Ampersand (also male and also a unique survivor of the coming pandemic), and the beginning of a large cast of well-conceived female characters. More it’s just to say that every story has its necessary pericope, embossed wholly by its narrator and that narrator’s circumstance of interest. This is not to say that we don’t get a good look and what their healthy and unhealthy, successful and unsuccessful reactions might look like. But since our present story explores such a world through the eyes of the most definitionally unique person in that world, the concerns of the remaining women are, for the most part, glimpsed through a lens primarily concerned with Yorick.

To be fair, it’s also a nightmare for all the surviving women as well-after all, nobody wants to wake up to a world of three billion rotting corpses. This is a world of chaos and desperation, a world trying to find its way in the cataclysm-wrought darkness.Īnd this is a world of nightmares and madness for Yorick Brown, the lone surviving man. This is a world where most of the world’s politicians, most of the world’s scientists, most of the world’s military, most of the world’s pilots, most of the world’s film-makers, and most of the world’s businessmen are no longer with us. In a single moment, the world’s animal population has been reduced by roughly half. Imagine a world in which every creature possessing a Y chromosome has just died.

Brian k vaughan y the last man