Have I ranted before about my main problem with mainstream superhero comics? (That's not rhetorical, I'm writing this on the train into work, so I can't easily check.) It's not anything about the underwear-on-the-outside suits or the unrealistic superpowers or the exaggerated story-telling or anything. It's that they never end. In the back of everyone's head when they're writing Superman issue #436 is that there's going to be an issue #437 and #438 and #536 and so on. So there are narrative arcs, but no one can change too much, because the whole thing has to keep rolling along. Individual writers even take chances, killing off favorite characters and so on, but then someone else always comes along and figures out how to bring them back from the DeadZone or whatever and so the reader learns not to get too worked up about any particular change -- it'll all be back to the status quo soon enough. It's my same problem with ongoing TV shows. I so much prefer stories that set out with an end in sight. Annnd, I just remembered that I did just rant about this in regards to Planet Hulk. Oh well.

So anyway, Y: The Last Man is not one of those stories. Brian Vaughan set out to tell a huge story -- what if every male animal on earth, including humans, died all at once? Except for one man and one monkey. And he did it in 60 issues of a monthly 24-page comic book.

Reading it all at once, like DVD-bingeing on an episodic TV show, it's perhaps not as even as something written all at once would be. There are definitely both some sections that feel crammed into 24 page chunks and others where there's some padding going on. And the very end of the story maybe feels like it has a bit of a deus ex machina to cram a happy ending on the thing. But overall it's an excellent story (that ends!).

FuzzyCo grade: A-