There's a fairly common plot device in a certain kind of pulpy sci-fi where a male protagonist will land on a planet/find an abandoned spaceship/fall into an alternate dimension/et cetera where there are a whole bunch of women, and no men, with sexy results. Or is that hilarious results? Anyway, reading this sort of thing can make one suspicious that this stuff gets written by (or more charitably, for) rather sexually frustrated nerds, and having spent a considerable part of my life being the same, I'm not about to leap to judgement. Actually, I think there's something quite touchingly innocent about writing something with such a pornographic premise and yet refraining from writing actual pornography. Or maybe it's cowardice rather than innocence...

...anyway, this rambling introduction to an old premise is meant as a preamble to a rambling take on said premise, Y: The Last Man. This is a comic book series which begins with a plague sweeping the Earth and killing all the men... except one. With sexy results!

Except the results aren't actually all that sexy. Yorrick (and his pet monkey, Ampersand, also male, and also alive... unlike all the other male mammals on the planet) has a girlfriend and therefore doesn't want to sleep around, at least until he can find her (she's in Australia) and talk things over. Possibly, if the survival of the human race depended on me having massive amounts of sex, I might be inclined to get on with it and save the awkward discussion of fidelity for later. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, since this is meant to be a review, perhaps I should say some of the things I like and dislike about this series. I like the art: it's clear and representational enough that, if you're like me, it's easy to accept that everything is what it looks like, and get lost in the story. And I like the premise and what's been done with it: all sorts of interesting sociological questions get examined through the lens of the death of all the men. Male-dominated professions - soldier, airline pilot, CEO, car-mechanic - have suddenly lost most of their practitioners. The writer has given a lot of thought to the consequences of these massive upheavals and while the results aren't necessarily "accurate" they're good enough to both provoke some interesting thoughts about what would happen, and to prevent me from losing attachment to the story out of frustrated indignation at clear unrealism. Nobody could really predict what would happen in such an event, is what I'm saying, but this makes a decent stab at saying what might happen.

And generally, I like the characters. The series is quite long and inevitably some of the walk-on walk-off characters are a bit thin, but for the most part the ongoing characters are likeable and have enough personality that I'm happy to spend a bunch of time hanging around with them.

So, what don't I like? Perhaps a minor niggle to begin with... it's a long series, and every so often there's a "random violent confrontation" which has nothing to do with the plot and from which no meaningful changes emerge... I understand these are thrown in to give the reader a break from constantly following the plot and just enjoy some random action, but I think the writer needs to learn a new trick because after you've pulled this same one seven or eight times it ceases to be diverting and becomes ridiculous. Ooh, another group of crazy women with guns confronts our group for no particular reason, how shocking! Speaking of following the plot... it is rather being dragged out. I think it's already longer than The Sandman was when it finished, and there's just much, much less in this than there was in that. I don't like being jerked around with arbitrary soap-operatic twists and "shocking revelations". At some point it ceases to be engaging and become annoying - see complaint above about random confrontations. Just tell me the story you've got to tell, don't keep adding bits to keep me listening... or buying, more to the point.

So, um, in summary? This is a pretty entertaining series, with nice art and likeable characters. And particularly in the early bit, it examines a whole bunch of social and gender questions from a new and interesting angle, in a way that's thought-provoking but also easy to get into. However, as it goes on it is burdened by more and more digression into what feels to me like just arbitrary "stuff", and for that reason I hesitate to really recommend it... at least until they wrap the damn thing up.