If you have been following our podcast recently, you know that Nick and I have been a bit sour on Y The Last Man ever since they capped our favorite character, 355. The book started strong and kept going for the first two or three trades. After that, the book started to lose the edge but we kept reading. Eventually Brian K Vaughn announced that the book would run for 60 issues and ever since we’ve been speculating how it would all end. The final cover (pictured right) was cryptic. Was it all a crazy man’s fantasy? A cautionary tale to a child? Our inquiring minds had to know, and the seemingly endless delays did not abate our thirst. But the wait is over! Y day is finally here. Read on for the quick and dirty.
Caution! Spoilers from here on out. Need some background or a recap? Check out the Wikipedia entry.
8 pages in, It’s sixty years later. People are cloned, there are flying cars, Yorick’s daughter is the President of France and the other ‘last man’ Vladimir is the Czar of Russia.
14 pages in, Yorick, clad in a straitjacket and post-suicide attempt meets one of his many clones, Yorick XVII.
26 pages in, Yorick married Beth 2, Hero and Beth 1 are a couple, the brood of Little ‘Dr. Mann’s are all grown up, and Yorick chose not to clone 355.
33 pages in, Yorick euthanizes Ampersand in his old age.
39 pages in, Yorick I drops some life lessons on Yorick XVII and then proceeds to escape his Parisian prison.
That’s it people. Yorick returns to the anonymity from whence he came - and 60 years later, I think he deserves it. He came to us mysteriously and leaves us much the same way.
This ending is too anticlimactic for me. I thought there was going to be another 4 pages when I got to the end. I wasn’t expecting a retrospective from the future. I was hoping for a blowout event - something to make up for the last 20 issues or so. Something that would make me throw up my hands and shout “Now that’s what I’m talking about!”, but no luck there.
Brian, congratulations on issue 60. It wasn’t what I was wanted- but things rarely are. Good luck with the movie! I hope you find someone better than Shia Labeouf to play Yorick.
Where you expecting something else? Leave a comment and let us know.
I wholeheartedly agree with this review of the book. It’s hard to read something for so long and be let down so profoundly. The death of 355 was hugely anti-climactic and helped usher in an unsatisfying conclusion to the series as a whole.
I know the Y: The Last Man series was on its way to being the best comic series I have ever read. Unfortunately, the ending only made it a disappointment.