Y THE LAST MAN: UNMANNED Review by Fleur, 16/05 Y THE LAST MAN: UNMANNED Brian K. Vaughan / Pia Guerra Yorick: Are you serious? After all the men died, I thought you guys would be holding hands down at the United Nations or something. When the hell did women get so petty and power-hungry? Congresswoman Brown: Didn't you vote for Hillary? Yorick: ... Point. Let's take a moment and just imagine a world without guys. I'm thinking an Ellie Sattler-esque moment of "woman... inherits the earth?", but immediately, one serious drawback comes to mind: who would I have left to boss around? That quick bout of happiness aside, Y: the Last Man presents us with an extensive answer to the question of what would happen if all the men on earth suddenly died. A setup that, to be honest, didn't appeal to me for quite some time -- it seemed doomed to be ridiculously sexist, and the art wasn't immediately inviting. Naturally, I was completely wrong about it all. The best thing about the first trade is, doubtlessly, the fact we have no setup or warning for the men all suddenly dropping dead. It's like Shaun of the Dead -- we don't know why there are zombies and we don't care. In Last Man, too, we're offered nothing through the entire first trade that might explain the sudden plague -- and who really cares why, anyway? The world Vaughan presents us with here is, in a word, unsettling. Females in power brings an unsurprising-once-you-think-about-it amount of corruption to the table, and the world seems to fall apart rather quickly. Vaughan's narrative structure is quite exceptional in this -- there are many relative time shifts, but unlike other series (the most recent Weapon X: Days of Future Now, for example) it's easy to keep track with a major grounding event for "now". Y: the Last Man is a relatively easy read -- it's extremely engaging and Unmanned is quite difficult to put down. Characteristically for Vaughan, there's great distribution between humour and heartstring tugs -- as well as drama and action. The characters we meet are all interesting - his main character, Yorick, in particular. By the end of Unmanned we've met the proverbial happy few, and things are set to go from there. The art for Y took me a while to appreciate, but its sparseness works for the story far more than anything else would have. It's very different from your standard superhero fare, but then again, so is Y itself. Correctly lauded as one of the best, most original works out the