Y: The Last Man is my favorite graphic novel of all time

It's been 10 years since I first read Y: The Last Man and it's such an absolute epic classic (I proclaim it my favorite graphic novel) that I decided to re-read it on my iPad in the library app Hoopla, which incidentally has an impressive graphic-novel collection and all of it can be borrowed in an instant.

The collection is available in five volumes (about 1,500 pages total) and it has it all: a monkey-infused plotline, lots of love triangles, globe hopping, political intrigue, examinations of major social issues, humor, and, of course, the apocalypse.

Or, rather, half an apocalypse? As the title implies, A 22-year-old man named Yorick Brown is the last man on Earth, and much of the books attempt to find out why this wiping out of all mammals with the “Y” chromosome has happened. Actually, Y’s travelling companion, Ampersand, is also a male, albeit of the monkey variety.

Yorick must travel secretly or risk the wrath of the many packs of women who are grappling with the loss of all males and, hence eventually, the end of the entire human race. Needless to say, many of these women are dangerous.

First Yorick leaves New York to get to his mother, a Congresswoman, in Washington D.C. He also meets with the new president, who assigns a beautiful dreadlocked agent, Agent 355, to protect him at all times. She takes him to Boston to meet Dr. Allison Mann, who will attempt to clone the last man. Meanwhile, his mother also tells an Israeli agent named Alter about Yorick, who continuously attempts to take him from 355’s clutches to use as leverage with her nation’s opponents.

Dr. Mann’s lab is destroyed in Boston and the three have to make their way to California to reach the backup lab. Their cross-country struggles take up a major portion of this epic.

The story goes international when a ninja named Toyota steals Ampersand and takes the monkey to Japan. Yorick, Dr. Mann, and 355 go there to retrieve him and stop along the way in Australia to look for Yorick’s beloved fiancée Beth. After many misses, they finally locate Beth in Paris and the two lovers try to get back to where they left off before the plague hit. But things are complicated when Yorick finally realizes he is deeply in love with 355.

The story unfortunately doesn’t end with quite the bang I had hoped for, but Dr. Mann’s experiments have worked, as we see in a flash-forward to 60 years in the future, when many clones of Yorick have been developed by the deceased Dr. Mann and the many clones she had successfully created of herself.

5 out of 5 stars

Because I might just make a tradition of revisiting it each decade, I’m laying out the array of main characters so I have them mapped out and don’t forget who’s who. There are spoilers, but if you've already read the series, you may want to use this as a refresher as well, because there are a healthy amount of important characters.

Yorick - The son of an Ohio politician mom, he’s never amounted to anything except being pretty good at magic tricks and making a lot of funny jokes with political and pop-culture references. 

Ampersand - His monkey. The only other male of any species still alive.

Beth - Y’s girlfriend traveling in Australia. She gets captured by an aborigine tribe. 

Hero - Y’s sister, a paramedic in Boston who cuts off a breast as part of joining in with the Amazons. She signs up to lead the search for the last man, not knowing it’s Yorick.

Dr. Mann - Boston bioengineer who studies asexual reproduction. She much later kills her father, who survived the plague and was also working on cloning, in competition with his daughter.

355 - The U.S president’s agent in Jordan trying to get an amulet necklace as part of her job in the government's secret "culper ring." Her family died in a car wreck when she was 8. She shoots the terrorists who block I-40, which allows food shipments to resume for the country.

Alter - An Israeli military woman, she is also on the trail of the last man and shows up in Boston at Dr. Mann’s lab. It later turns out the person giving her team from Tel Aviv instructions is somehow none other than Yorick’s mom, but Alter doesn’t actually plan to hand Yorick off to his mom, who she considers a terrorist. She wants to take Y back to Israel and have the U.S. start a war with her country otherwise she thinks the two countries will turn on themselves and destroy themselves. She was militarized and hates other nations from when her sister was accidentally killed by an Israeli tank when she was protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes. 

Representative Jennifer Brown - Yorick’s mom. She recruits Israel because she used to work with Alter’s predecessor who always spoke highly of her. Plus the U.S. military is still in disarray and she wanted the best to find her son. She suspects 355 is part of the culper ring, a dirty-tricks pseudo agency of the government and Brown placed a tracking device in Ampersand. Alter enters her office right after she sees the naked newspaper photo of her son and shoots her dead.

Margaret Valentine - Former agriculture secretary named as the new president by the chain of succession. She arrives at the White House to interrupt a militia of Republican congressmen’s wives who are coming in guns ablaze to demand they get their husband’s seats. But the first act of the president (who was herself a Republican) is to arrest them instead. 

Victoria - Evil red-headed leader of the Daughters of the Amazon. She is killed by Hero when Hero decides she is no longer an evil Amazon and that Y is not the enemy.

Sonia - Convicted junkie in Marrisville who falls for Yorick and shares a kiss with him while chopping wood. She kills Victoria with an ax to the head right as Victoria was about to execute Yorick. Then Hero shoots an arrow straight into her heart. 

Natalya - Blonde stowaway on Yorick’s westbound train who has come from Russia to retrieve the one Russian male left, who is on the space station. She also tells the group of a nuclear reactor in Kazakhstan that has killed tons of people and will further spread the plague.

Ciba - A femail astronaut who make it back to Earth. She has been impregnated and she doesn’t know which of the two male astronauts is the father. Both males die upon earth landing. Ciba has a baby boy, Vladimir, right as a Hero is arriving nearby in the Plains to find her brother.

Heather and Heidi Hartle - Run the top-secret government hideout in Kansas that no male politicians ever made it to. Natalya and Dr. Mann will stay with them to monitor astronaut Ciba’s pregnancy.

Cayce, Edie, and Henrietta - Actors in a touring with a theatrical troupe passing through Nebraska who write a play about women who find the last man on earth. Meta.

711 - 355’s culper ring colleague who has retired since her husband died. She lives in a cabin outside Denver and watches Yorick while Dr. Mann and 355 go to the hospital to treat Ampersand. She uses unusual methods to help Y better understand his pseudo death wish.

Leah - A 16-year-old in Arizona who swears to protect her state even if the rest of the U.S. must go down.

P.J. - A bald mechanic and former ska bassist who runs into the gang in the desert and notifies them I-40 has been cut off by a terrorist gang. She is shot while protecting Yorick. Y then shot her killer with the gun 355 let him borrow; but he told 355 and Dr. Mann that P.J. shot her.

Beth - Not Yorick’s fiancée, but another Beth he meets upon arriving in California. She’s at a church and is a former flight attendant who brought the plane she was on down during the moment all the men died. She’s the first woman Y finally sleeps with. Later on she has his baby, a girl. 

Anna Strong - Red-haired leader of the Setauket Ring, a breakaway group from the government Culper Ring. She takes Yorick’s silver and gold engagement ring, which Dr. Mann is starting to suspect has something to do with Y’s magical powers of survival. They are looking for 355’s Amulet of Helene, which they destroy at Candlestick Park the moment 355 hands it over, without exchanging Yorick’s engagement ring. 355 turns the table and breaks Anna’s neck but leaves her alive.

Toyota - Ninja who steals Ampersand and knives 355 badly. She escapes via San Diego to Yokogata, where Dr. Mann’s mother lives. We discover that Amp has been mixed up with another monkey which is why he’s been kidnapped, but he escapes upon docking.

Lieutenant Rose Copen - Mistaken as a pirate on the ship to Japan who informs Dr. Mann that the boat is smuggling tons of heroin and she wants to stop it. Turns out she’s with the Royal Australian Navy. She sleeps with Dr. Mann and they start to fall in love, then Dr. Mann’s mom stabs her. While she’s unconscious she admits she is actually a spy.

Kilina - Captain of the heroin smuggling ship and fools around with Yorick before he realizes the truth about her.

Red headed journalist who falls over a balcony with 355. Both live and then she escapes. 

Sister Lucia Ober - Kidnaps pregnant Beth and Hero. She is the highest ranking woman in the Catholic Church, from Vatican City. She wants the baby to become the Pope so he can declare women can be ordained as the church’s leaders. Turns out the baby is a girl.

The old 355 - Recruited 355 to the Culper Ring after she had killed two racist bullies as a 15-year-old.

You - Former cop and private investigator who created a male robot in Tokyo. Bartered Ampersand for a woman to spend a month with the robot.

Dr. Mann’s mom - Stabs Rose when she arrives with her daughter in Japan. Turns out she had met President Valentine before the plague and become her advisor, having set the whole thing up to get the man and the monkey to her daughter in Boston. Later, we find that Dr. Mann’s dad has also survived and has been making clones of Dr. Mann.

Key Settings

Washington D.C. is the scene of much of the action. The Washington Monument has been turned into a memorial for all the men. Women sing in worship/memory there all the time. Yorick reveals himself to a group of Amazons and 355 has to save him. 

Marrisville, Ohio is where Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann have to leap from a train car. They end up there with an entire town of women who were let out of prison so they wouldn’t starve in their cells.

Kansas government bunker, near where spaceship returns to Earth.

Queensbrook, Arizona is where a group of women are nationalists for their, um, state. The gang was going to go through Utah but the whole state is on fire. And a group of 8 descending from Timothy McVeigh’s ideology have shut down I-40 through Arizona and cut off food and supplies to everyone out west.

San Francisco - The gang makes it here so Dr. Mann can set up her backup lab and work on her cloning project. She discovers Yorick survived the plague because he was with Ampersand and the monkey’s poop somehow shielded him.

Australia is now home to tons of heroin addicts and Japan might be next if the pirate boat shipment arrives there. 

Cooksfield, California - This is where Hero is looking for Yorick’s Beth but instead finds the former flight attendant Beth, very pregnant with Y’s baby. But then the Swiss Guard private army of Vatican City captures and takes Hero and Beth hostage. 

And that's just a little bit of the story ...