“Comedy & Tragedy”
Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artists: Paul Chadwick (p), Jose Marzan Jr. (i)
This is the comic that you should be reading. When I first picked up the trade of issues 1-5 I couldn’t get enough of the story. This concept (of a disease or somesuch wiping out all male lifeforms on the planet with the exception of one human and one monkey), while it definitely has been done by others before, is very well paced out on the whole. And thus far, has me eagerly awaiting each new issue.
And this coming from someone who doesn’t read Vertigo comics.
What you need to know:
A plague has wiped out all those animals which possess a Y chromosome on the planet Earth. Save for two, Yorick Brown, your everyday slacker and novice escape artist, and his monkey. Given his unique status the United States government is tying to get him cross country to a lab which will attempt to determine how it is that he has survived the plague. All the while various other groups are hunting him down.
So there we have the premise of a world without men in Y: The Last Man.
Issue #16 finds us coming off a storyline that questioned whether our hero Yorick was the last man in the Universe, so you might think it’s time for a breather.
And you'd be right.
But what some writers might use for filler, a break for themselves before getting back to the meat of the story, Vaughan lets us think a bit about the world that is left trying to pick up the pieces. Sure we need to find out why the plague happened, and how Yorick and his monkey are the only two surviving males. But Vaughan tells us… “Don’t worry about all of that, there’s other things happening in this world, and let’s take a look at them”.
What we have is part 1 of 2 that delves deeper into the world that Brian K. Vaughan has created with this concept. In fact, it was something that was hinted at much earlier in the series. What do the survivors do for entertainment? At some point in the face of this natural disaster people will begin trying to find normalcy in their lives, and that means music, art, and the theater.
Or put simply: Escape.
Enter the Fish and Bicycle Traveling Theater Troupe, a company of actors in the vein of the old traveling shows of Vaudeville. So when the show rolls into Nebraska one would think that it would be standard plays and such. However, when an injured monkey is found near their camp, and when the monkey is discovered to be male, the director finally has her muse. She will write a play about the last man on Earth. An attempt to give hope to some, but also to write about the situation they all find themselves in. She will write about “life in the post-plague world”.
So it is time to catch our breath, but also a time to realize that the world doesn’t quite revolve around Yorick (at least not quite yet). That life goes on in some form or fashion for all the survivors.
What did you think of this book?
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