Y: The Last Man is one of my three top favorite comic book series, and the latest bound collection has just hit the shelves. Y is the story of Yorick Brown, the last male survivor of a mystery plague that has wiped out all the men on Earth. The seven (and counting) volumes in the saga chronicle his encounters with mysterious espionage rings, homespun farm communities, radical Amazon warriors, government thugs and civic heroes, and there's never a moment to stop and catch your breath on the way.
Volume 7, Paper Dolls, picks up the story with Yorick on a sub docked in a heroin-wracked Australia. Yorick convinces his minders to let him slip into Sydney to try to track down his long-lost fiancee. About half the book is told in flashbook, filling in the fascinating life's stories of characters we've come to know and love. The artwork is expressive — sometimes moody and sometimes comic, but always sharp. The dialogue is likewise sharp: the wisecracks in Y are some of the best reasons to pick this series up.
Y makes me wish I had a time machine so I could jump forward six or eight months and pick up the next collection. Every one of the Y books has left me wanting more. Lots more.
See also:
The first Y collection