The post-apocalyptic story is well-trodden ground in science fiction, but a remarkable example of such a thing just wrapped up its final issue: the comic book series, Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. A plague instantly kills all men on Earth but one, the title character Yorick. The series covers the next five years of life on our planet: survival, sex, cloning, road trips, an Amazon cult, pirates, androids, monkeys, and much more. Will human civilization die out in one generation? Can the group of characters around Yorick survive? The story of Y was never boring, that's for sure. Best of all, it's all incredibly smooth, deceptively simple in fact, both visually and at the prose level.

I did a round-up of science-fiction comics two years ago for Strange Horizons (No Superheroes Allowed) and came to the conclusion that there's not much of such a thing, considering how the comics industry, in North America in particular, is focused on superheroes (Iain Jackson's column last week gave me some new titles to track down). Y: The Last Man is one of the main exceptions; at that time, the series was about two-thirds done, and already expectations were sky-high. Just recently, the whole thing concluded in a fireworks show of hype, including its very own party and charity auction. I'd like to examine the story as a whole, now that it is complete.

Brian K. Vaughan wrote the series, but as in any comic book run, the writer needs quite a few collaborators on the visual side. Vaughan and the artist Pia Guerra are credited as the creators of the series, but other names are also attached to the project. Other names I've seen on Y: The Last Man have been: Jose Marzan Jr., Paul Chadwick, Goran Parlov, Goran Sudzuka, J.G. Jones, and Massimo Carnevale. For a more thorough explanation of this than I can provide, along with some visual samples from the various issues, see this slideshow from Flak Magazine.

I always read comics in collected format: since I'm dipping into the field and catching up on interesting bits and pieces rather than reading comprehensively, I'm generally moving from one completed project to another. That means that I bought the first nine volumes of Y: The Last Man in trade paperback format. But the tenth and final collection doesn't come out until June of this year—there was no way I could wait! The single issues are all out and the rumors are flying around the internet and on the various blogs I read, and I'm not one of those people who handles spoilers very gracefully. So I pestered some comics fans (who were more than happy to help me out—thanks Carol and Ian!) for a loan of all the recent issues. I hadn't read a "comic book" in a single issue in years and years—what a weird experience! For one thing, there were about a billion advertisements, all very glossy and distracting. Another reason for someone chronically behind on this or that storyline, like me, to wait for the collection.

It also made me think about how much serialized entertainment is still out there, despite the notion that such things died out with Dickens, the most famous practitioner of the serial. I've spent a fair amount of time recently catching up on TV shows, which is another case where I usually end up catching up on a completed project rather than waiting week-to-week with everyone else. I'm still not entirely sure if the "all in one gulp" approach is the best way to encounter something that's based so strictly in serialized form. For example, it's a very different experience to catch up on seven years of Buffy without any gaps between seasons as opposed to waiting and wondering and speculating with all the other fans.

(Weirdly, another long-in-the-works conclusion has been reached: Season 5 of The Wire has just wrapped. I'm about halfway through Season 4, and desperately trying to avoid online spoilers. The parallels are uncanny: both Y: The Last Man and The Wire started in 2002, the comic book had 60 issues and the show had 60 episodes, and both ended within a month of each other!)

Back to Y! Although I should add that the mention of Buffy is apropos, since Vaughan and Joss Whedon have become friends and they've swapped duties on their comic book runs of Runaways and Buffy Season 8 respectively. I'm not entirely surprised by this development, since I would argue that the most concise way of describing the character work in Y: The Last Man is by comparison to the works of Whedon, he of the snappy dialogue and well-regarded characterization.

Some pretty heavy spoiler warnings for this next section, since part of what's interesting about a long series like this is how the creators see fit to wrap things up. I'll try to avoid spoilers of the who-dies variety, and focus more on the ideas driving the conclusion.

So, final issues of Y tell us, what was the cause of the plague? How could a virus spread instantaneously over the whole world? Vaughan offers two explanations: one mystical and generally dismissed by the characters, and another that was more of a full explanation, but didn't seem particularly convincing to me. At first read anyways. When I came back to it a second time, knowing full well that I wasn't going to get any other explanation, I was, more or less, satisfied, so to speak . . . maybe. The mystical explanation involves the much-fabled, and apparently cursed, Amulet of Helene, which I see as either a red herring or an unexplained bit of backstory that is easy to misunderstand.

It's in the ninth collection, Motherland, that the full "scientific" explanation comes to light, and here's where the convincing is required. Vaughan uses the idea of morphogenetics: giant leaps in evolution can ripple through the whole living sphere of Earth, and when one bit of DNA somewhere learns something new, there's a chance it will propagate everywhere, with no direct contact required. As we discover in book nine, at least two human babies are cloned (through the efforts of several characters), and at the moment of the birth of one of them, the men of the world, morphogenetically speaking, are an evolutionary dead-end. At least that's my understanding of it, since it all remained a bit fuzzy. It took me a few tries googling "morphogenetics" before I understood what Vaughan was running with here; taking a wacky and unprovable bit of speculation as a basis for a sci-fi story is a venerable practice, from canals on Mars to the Gaia Hypothesis to alien pyramids. And looking at the next step in human evolution has driven books from Clarke's Childhood's End to Bear's Darwin's Radio. Vaughan's is still not a viscerally convincing explanation for me, though.

That said, I don't think Vaughan cares that much about the explanation. That stuff all happens in Motherland, book nine, and there's a whole set of issues—six in total that will be released as the final volume—that take place after the ostensible mystery has been cleared up. Here's where the controversy begins, since Vaughan kills off a major human character, and then in the final issue itself, kills off a major animal character (that's a bit of a spoiler of a non-spoiler—sorry!). If you read around on various online forums—please don't until you've finished the series—you'll see some bitter complaining about these two deaths. Apparently that makes it a depressing ending. Uh, well, 3 billion people died at the beginning of the story—was that exhilarating or something?! What were you expecting? It's like Battlestar Galactica all over again, where a story that starts with mega-mega-megadeath can hardly be faulted if the relationship storylines are lacking in the shiny/happy department.

I'm still ambivalent about the general approach to the last man on earth story. The high concept works well—in fact, Vaughan pulls it off with far more grace than he had any right to, and he gets an enormous boost from Guerra's art (which I talked about a bit in my earlier piece). But like a vast proportion of stories in our culture, this is a story about a boy becoming a man. The women are there, everywhere in fact since our hero Yorick has no other humans to interact with, but this is a man's rite of passage, pure and simple. The last segment of Motherland has some ill-advised self-parody, where one of the side characters starts writing a comic book about the last woman on Earth. I don't know if this version would have been any better, but while Vaughan hits a high percentage of the right notes along the way, I was glad to see the series wrapped up.

The "Final Issue" itself, issue 60, takes us 60 years into the future, appropriately enough. Life goes on, most of the characters that were dear to us have died. I'm also ambivalent about this approach; I know, intellectually speaking, that this is a realistic thing, since the world does, indeed, go on. But at the visceral level that the story had been operating on until that moment, our focus was drawn in fairly tight.

One good thing about this flashforward: it emphasizes the science-fictional elements of the story in a way that helps to wrap it up, on a conceptual level. Yes, there are an abundance of character moments here, love 'em or hate 'em, but the high-concept stuff is all tied up with a bow. Or, an empty straitjacket, to use the lovely final metaphor.

As always with the end of a long series, the inevitable question is: what to read next?

I don't know if there is anything precisely as smooth and ambitious as Y: The Last Man out there. Vaughan himself is a busy guy, and I would recommend his titles Pride of Baghdad and Ex Machina. I've had Vaughan's Runaways recommended to me but I haven't had a chance to take a look at it myself.

There are plenty of other post-apocalyptic books out there and even a book by Frank Herbert called The White Plague where all the women get killed off. I get my fill of such things fairly quickly, so I'm not in the mood so soon after the wrap of Y.

Any comics fans have some suggestions?