Y, The Last Man - Brian K Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan, Jr

 

Melanie picked this one up at Cemetery Pulp as she had heard good things about it and, indeed, it has gotten insanely, over-the-top rave reviews and while we both enjoyed it, neither of us thought it was "the best graphic novel we've ever read" or anything like that! 

It's an unlikely tale of some undefined event causing the death of every single male on the planet, including sperm(!), except for one random, utterly ordinary guy, Yorik (yes) and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Once he discovers what has happened, he wants to get to his girlfriend who happens to currently be in Australia, so we follow his unlikely adventures. 

His mother is not ordinary, however, and is a Congressperson, and so when he checks in with her before going off on his travels, she assigns a (female, of course) Secret Service person so accompany him. They run into numerous characters and find his sister, Hero (another Shakespearean reference), who has attached herself to a terrorist group calling themselves the Amazons, which of course does not bode well for any of them.

As this is book one, we leave off as Yorik is about to continue his travels - after much mayhem - and we discover a couple of surprises.

This isn't bad and we will look into the further books, but is it the best graphic novel ever? Not at all. But, an interesting concept with some extremely depressing statistics involved. We shall see how it progresses.