Greetings from the Mornington Peninsula! For the millions of readers who’ve never heard of this idyllic spot, I should explain that it’s a part of Melbourne which has the bay on one side and the ocean on the other side. It’s a popular, cheapish holiday spot and the living is easy.
I’m here practicing being a high school teacher and am driving home through roads with kangaroo-warning signs. Warning because if your car hits a kangaroo when one of you is travelling at over 80 kilometres per hour it can be fatal for car, driver and/or kangaroo. If my column stops appearing, you’ll know the worst – that somewhere down under there’s a wrecked Ford station wagon wrapped around a eucalyptus tree, with an inert ‘roo tail sticking out of a smashed-up windscreen my ‘Mill on the Floss’ tape poignantly playing in a cracked way. I’m listening to the complete novel by George Eliot on tape while I drive through this marsupial-infested countryside and will be spitting chips if I die before I find out if Tom wipes out his father’s debt and whether or not Maggie and Phillip get it on before casette number 12.
Two kangaroos spar in readiness for leaping in front of my station-wagon.
Amazingly, this town has a library jam-packed with comics. I say ‘amazingly’ because most of the non-kangaroo inhabitants seem to live for the beach and don’t seem like bookish types. I’ve read books 1 to 4 of ‘Y The Last Man’, an Ennis Hellblazer, two fo the ‘Fables’ books, and have just borrowed Will Eisner’s ‘Contract with God’ trilogy. I’m supposed to be reading Lord of the Flies and Romeo and Juliet and preparing lessons about them,but you’ve got have a hobby.
I wish I could say I’ve been electrified by all this reading, but I haven’t. ‘Y The last Man’ is a great premise (all the males on earth die, except for one dork and his pet monkey), up there with Day of the Triffids and The Children of Men. I could spend ages wondering how it would work out, which is the effect all great premises tend to have. Breathes there a nerd with soul so dead they haven’t wondered how the island in ‘The Prisoner’ organises things or speculated on how they would free the planet of angry whip-cracking plants?
However, it’s not as good as the cover suggests. Some reviewer says that ‘Y’ justified the existence of comics, which seems to be overdoing it a bit. I mean, it’s cute and readable, I want to find out how it ends and would gladly read all the other volumes, but you know, it’s only a comic. It doesn’t make me want to race out and urge it on my non-comicsy friends the way Preacher or Viz did. The art is good but bland. It does the job. I find it slowly hilarious that the hero, instead of rooting himself to a standstill, seems to never get any. All the women he meets are interested in something else beside the only functioning testicles on the planet. That is the next most interesting thing about the comic after the premise. However, the series is not in my comics pantheon.
A Deceptively Brilliant Y cover, giving no hint of the unremarkable art that lies within
WIth great premises, we still need good characters. Or do we? Everyone remembers War of the Worlds, but nobody I know ever talks about the narrator. characters in Y include a tough secret agent who works for some shadowy US government body. She’s as invulnerable as James Bond and about one millionth of the fun. There are a bunch of seperatist, man-hating lesbians who you’d expect to be whooping it up. They aren’t though, they spend all their time being pissed off at other women for missing the men and trying to kill the last man. That’s those crazy feminist types for you. There are also some tough Israeli commando types and a Russian, both of whom have been to cliche school. There is also the last male monkey who is a cute idea and only slightly less limited than the Israelis and the Russian.
This may make me sound a little negative. Contrary too, since I’m reading as much of this series as I can get my hands on. I still want to know how it turns out. Does humanity survive? If so, how? Who does the secret agent woman work for? I want, but don’t yearn, to know these things.
I’ve been told off recently for not having more proper detail about the last series I reviewed (‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ by Kazuko Koike and Goseki Kojima) and for being too frivolous about something so good.
I thought about the comments and went back to put in the artist’s and writer’s names, but overall I think I’ll keep frivoling. There is any amount of serious bibliographical information about comics series out there – in fact far too much – and as for serious reviews of comics – why should I add to the tidal wave. People who want long, respectful thoughtful analyses of Y can look for them on ‘Dogpile’ easily. Flippant stuff about comics as they appear to me; that’s my brief for this column.
yours roo-dodgingly,
Floyd
