The Wilcox Foxtrot

by Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra

SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE SERIES, OBVIOUSLY

Okay. We made it. The last volume of Y: The Last Man. A lot of the questions have been allegedly answered. The gang has broken up and everyone’s planning on meeting in Paris, France. Yorick is closer than ever to finding his fiance, Beth. The BIG EVENTS occurred in the last issue, were delivered quietly and tragically, with Vaughn and Guerra working at their very best to help lead us to a satisfying conclusion. Therefore, this one feels more like a tying-up-all-the-loose-ends and setting up the future of humanity sort of thing. 

By now, we’ve been with these characters long enough to to feel true emotional resonance toward them. Vaughn and Guerra, especially when Vaughn and Guerra are working together and not some other penciller, have figured out each other’s strengths and weaknesses as comic storytellers, so Guerra can convey true pain one moment with just an uplifting of the mouth on a character, while Vaughn happily fills in all the details. 

Whatever the Isreali ladies are up to is the main antagonistic force in this collection, and though Alter’s confession and motivation makes sense for her character, her time in the narrative ran its course a long time ago, so she’s just annoying, in her personality and actions. 

We’re given an epilogue to close everything off. The lives and afterlives of all these characters are traced in hazy, dreamlike detail, flashing back from 60-some years in the future to a few years immediately after the main events of the narrative. It’s painful, but it gives you closure, I guess. (Did Vaughn and Guerra really need to? Maybe by knowing everything that happened, they tried to save themselves from having to resurrect the series for a sequel or something, but the blatantness and void ambiguity sort of take the fun out of it.)

As a whole, Y: The Last Man, is a fairly strong, post-apocalyptic odyssey, with three leads that you want to follow through the entire thing, a well realized world where I at least bought the changes and tribulations civilization had to go through, and fun villains who show up and you go, “OH SHIT!” (this, of course, is before they overstay their welcome). The art and storytelling were consistent enough, although Vaughn has a tendency to repeat himself in set pieces and action sequences at times. 

Along the way, we’re given themes of balance, of perseverance, of art at the end of the world. Not all of it works, but when it does, it stands as some great storytelling. Not the most profound series I’ve read, but creative enough and endearing in its way. Overall, four out of five from me.  

by Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra

Finally, in the penultimate arc of this series, Vaughn and Guerra decide to give us answers about the cause of the plague. Or possibly one of the causes of the plague. It’s difficult to say for sure, since everyone’s running in hypertheory. 

We’ve moved now from Japan to Hong Kong, chasing after the Ninja samurai assassin woman, Toyota. The Isrealis (who I didn’t think were necessary to bring back, and still feel the same way) are closing in. There’s a convergence point for everyone. 

The first half of the series had a lot more chases and explosions, crazy revolutionaries and odd cults. For the latter half, since they left America, Vaughn and Guerra have pulled back, allowed the story to get quieter and more interpersonal. It’s a bold move that, for character, when it works, works really well. The climax of this arc, where Dr. Mann faces off against an old associate who wants to kill Ampersand, as well as some Ampersand related stuff, is earned specifically because of the pain Guerra draws into the character’s faces, not to mention all the things Dr. Mann herself doesn’t say. 

The collection ends with a meta-issue about the theater girls from an earlier volume, who have moved up in the world and are making movies now, but finding that not all women are buying their desire for explosions and bland action movie characterizations. So they turn to comics, inversing the plague so that all the men survive and a single woman has to travel alone. Yorick’s reading it and sums it up as “Meh.” Self-aware. 

by Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra

Team Yorick goes up against the Yakuza to rescue Ampersand in this pretty fun addition to the series. 

Frankly, I’m running out of things to say about these books so far. Team Yorick continues to get into trouble, girls continue to make these wacky gangs around themselves, the world isn’t more peaceful or beneficial than it was with the men (a character remarks that it’s all about establishing balance, and we may think women are the more peaceful of the sexes because they have to make up for the men, but without men, they go just as crazy). The writing is consistent and the art just the right kinds of moody. There are twists and turns and it’s interesting to see where all this is going.

What I’m not liking though, and this has started happening fairly recently, is that Vaughn and Guerra are skipping the ending of the action scenes. Stuff happens, all right, then there’s a fade to black and an abrupt cut to later. It feels like we’re being cheated, since Vaughn and Guerra, at this point, seem to want to have more action and intensity than anything. 

Two volumes left.

by Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra

Right now, Vaughn and Guerra are still at a standstill with this series. Our characters are in Australia, looking for both Yorick’s fiance, Beth (who is having some wacky visions of her own), and preparing to head off to Japan to save Yorick’s monkey, Ampersand. But that’s okay, because this issue isn’t so much about furthering the plot of the narrative, but of pausing and giving you more insight into the characters.

It’s been no secret that I think this series has been at its best when it jumps back in time and shows you what helped bring the characters up to this moment. We get more of that here than anywhere, including the important path of Agent 355 (who, for as tough as she was originally, really does get her ass handed to her on a pretty consistent basis) and, my favorite part, from Ampersand’s POV. (This sequence includes probably one of the most heartbreaking moments I’ve seen in this series so far, where Yorick tries to go see a friend, whose carcass is being devoured by feral cats.)

The humor and the character help carry this one along. The art is still fantastic and, what’s more, consistent, even though Guerra doesn’t turn the work in for every issue. What I also appreciate is how the world isn’t as detrimental as it was just a couple volumes ago. The women are figuring out how they’re going to go about setting them ups, and civilization is starting to return. It’s another plotline happening in the background and, I think, much more effective there. 

by Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra

Back on the road again. For a little while there, Team Yorick thought they were able to settle down, take some breathing time, come down to Earth in San Francisco, but, bam!, right then, Ampersand, the monkey, has been kidnapped by a JAPANESE NINJA ASSASSIN and they’re on the trail again.

Pretty standard serial stuff. Think Appa. Think Han Solo. Think Frodo. Think Ron. 

This volume focuses on the sea-leg portion of their voyage, as they hitch a ride with a group of sailor women allegedly delivering medical supplies, who, in turn, are being pursued by a submarine of Australian seawomen. Them hitching a ride and getting pursued by some faction is getting a little played out at this point, and Vaughn and Guerra are stalling for time again. Their hearts don’t seem to be as involved in the action sequences in this one either. The character moments are short and scattershot, except for Yorick, whose genuine glee at finding another English major on board is infectious. 

The collection ends with a flashback issue through Beth, Yorick’s girlfriend, in this dream haze, which is definitely the standout chapter here. 

At one point, a character says, “There’s millions of people left in the world, and still the story always focuses on the one man.” (I’m paraphrasing a bit.) As much as I like Yorick, the story’s lately been picking up/been much more interesting when we pull back from him. (Except for the Tel Aviv assassins, who are back now and just as annoying.) 

by Robertson Davies

With this book, Davies throws a lot of elements and themes at you, almost as if he’s saying, ‘I understand you’re not going to get everything I’m thinking, because, hey, I’m Canadian and a little crazy, as evidenced by my beard,’ —

— and that’s part of the charm and interest with this book, what makes it work and what makes it interesting. 

Nominally, it’s the story for Dunstan Ramsay, who grew up in the fictional Canadian town of Deptford (indeed, this is the first book in Davies’s Deptford Trilogy) and has spent the rest of his life teaching, travelling, and living in the shadows of some of the town’s more prominent residents. 

Davies is interested in a lot of Jungian theory, and apparently each of his characters represents some sort of face of those theories — I don’t know a lot about them, so don’t see fit to comment more than this little bit.

He’s also fascinated by myth and legend, and his characters are constantly travelling somewhere on some adventure. What’s more, there’s a lot of changing of character, a lot of themes of rebirth, of personal reinvention. 

It’s a dense and fascinating novel, exhausting though not long, with a sense of humor and tragedy and wonder running like a current through it. 

by Laurent Binet

For any major event in history, there’s bound to be someone who makes an attempt to fictionalize it. Just look at the listing for the subject of this book, even. It covers the assassination attempt of Reinhard Heydrich by a pair Czech and Slovick parachutists under orders from the British government. (Heydrich, for those of you who don’t know, is the man basically responsible for the Holocaust, and was the architect of the Final Solution and conquerer of Prague.) There’s probably a ton of books on this man alone, a fact Binet acknowledges basically by bringing all of them up. While Binet is interested in the assassination plot, he’s also equally interested in the ways we rewrite history, in the things we have to do to events to make them fit into a story.

So yes, Binet’s book is ridiculously metafictional. He’s inserted himself, or at least a version of himself, into the narrative, with the conceit that he’s doing all this research and giving you the information. But this is a novel, so there’s a certain leeway to the information he’s finding, and the mode of storytelling has to fit into the story.

Binet acknowledges this, too. 

He delivers his book in a series of short chapters — something like 250 of them altogether — covering Heydrich’s beginning to the minute details of the parachutists. It operates, therefore, on a Day of the Jackel sort of momentum (I’m assuming, because I haven’t actually read that book), and all the planning and preparations help make the final payoff that much more rewarding. And as much fun as all his metafictional games are, his questions of what’s real and how can we ever truly know what happens during any given events and how much influence a narrator or the narrator’s source has on an event or the failure of perception, a good climax is always worth noting. 

It’s a fascinating specimen, this book; ambitious, bold, and utterly fascinating.