Thing I Like #4: Y - The Last Man

Being in my fourth year and all, I'm pretty much strapped for time all the time. I've gotten used to this overarching feeling of dread-- with four parts guilt and one part panic-- when I'm sitting around not doing anything productive (not that this stops me from sitting around not doing anything productive). But there is one thing that I indulge in that I do without any regrets whatsoever. And that, dear readers, is a good comic book.

Now, I haven't been in the comic (or "comix," as Art Spiegelman refers to them) scene for very long, but I'm beginning to recognize a good one when I see it. Wanted, on which the movie is loosely based, is not.

Y - The Last Man, on the other hand, so totally is.

Before I go on: I've included some frames/pages from Y and I've tried to choose ones that are the least spoilerrific. The examples I've chosen are pretty representative of the awesomeness that is Y - The Last Man, but I assure you that things only get more awesome once you get into the series itself.

I am by no means a comix expert, but there are a few things about the genre itself that the English major in me can come to appreciate. I would also hesitate to call myself a post-modernist (whatever that entails), but I've always been a fan of self-reflexivity. Even cartoons from my childhood-- there was something especially charming about a cartoon that recognizes the fact that it's a cartoon. This still holds true (for me, anyway) with literature. Y
does this brilliantly.

Though, you don't need to be a pretentious snob literary critic to appreciate Y on its own merits. The art itself is phenomenal. I don't necessarily mean the style of the illustrations, but the layout of the frames and careful construction of images. I found myself rereading pages because I was blown away by the attention to detail. And this is saying something, considering these things usually go right over my head. For me, the allure of comix is that the added visual element adds so much more to the narrative content than words can do alone-- yet another thing Y does exactly right.

And-- above everything else-- Y - The Last Man is just funny. It doesn't even matter if you don't know the conventions of a comic book or if you can't read between the lines if your life depended on it. All you need to know is the basic premise: a mysterious something happens and all of a sudden, everything with a Y chromosome dies-- except our main hero, Yorick, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Hilarity-- and drama, and violence, and sex, and heartbreak, and all the rest-- ensues.

Just as an aside: there's a film adaptation in the works with Shia "The Beef" Lebeouf rumoured to be up for the role of Yorick. I, for one, have had enough of this kid. Dear powers-that-be: please, please don't let this happen. I don't think he's nearly as snarky nor mature enough for the role. On the other hand, I can't help but picture Ryan Reynolds as the perfect Yorick. Plus, he's better eye candy than Shia, which would attract a larger crowd, which may turn some of them on to the comix, which may turn some of them on to comix in general. Everybody wins!

Except maybe The Beef, but I'm okay with that.