Y: The Last Man Deluxe Volume 2 (Vertigo/DC)
Written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Pia Guerra with Paul Chadwick & Goran Parlov
Collects Y: The Last Man #11-23

My original intent when diving back into the wild world of Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man was to focus on all five deluxe collections without jumping around. But, after reading the first volume, and reliving both the intensity of the series and some of Yorick Brown’s more annoying character ticks, I needed to take a break. So, I burned through a few trades that I’ll get around to reviewing soon enough, both to cleanse my palet a bit and also to get some of the books out of my “to read” long box (I’ve set up a lot of Sequential Swaps lately and had a good deal of books coming in).

Even after feeling pretty accomplished knocking a few books off the list, I was drawn right back to Y. This volume was split about 50/50 between stuff I remembered from my first reading of the book and stuff I didn’t remember at all. I remembered all the astronaut stuff pretty much down to the letter, though there were some surprises in who dies and who doesn’t. I also mostly remembered the mostly Yorick-less theater storyline which was a nice little treat. But then you’ve got the stuff with Agent 711 as well as the Sons of Arizona stuff which had completely slipped my mind. Even remembering some of the details, though, it’s all in how BKV tells the story that makes this such a great book to read.

My main complaint about the first volume was that Yorick can be an incredibly annoying character. He’s basically a smartass kid who’s done nothing with his life that loves making cultural references to make himself feel more worldly. When I was younger, I could relate to that a lot more, but now I just want this wiseacre to clam up. Just to clarify, that’s not a complaint about the writing. I think all of that is very purposeful on BKV’s part. Yorick’s whole journey about this series is to become a better, well-rounded human being (plus that whole saving the world thing). The beauty of this volume is that BKV shifts the focus from Yorick a bit before subjecting him to 711’s unique brand of therapy (man, what an intense string of issues!) which then leads into a story that starts showing how Yorick has changed. I’m not sure how these issues are broken up in the normal trades, but I thought it was a really interesting structure for this collection.

While reading through this volume I realized another element that makes this book so accessible to new readers and non-comic book fans and that is that the art is both realistic and cartoony. By realistic I mean that it’s not ultra-stylized and by cartoonish I mean that you could see this kind of art in something like a newspaper comic strip or a greeting card (I’m having trouble thinking of other places where non-comic fans see static art). This idea came to me while looking at a page and thinking something along the lines of, “This isn’t too far off from the kind of art you’d see in an Archie comic.” It’s an interesting thought because on one hand it almost lulls you into lowered expectations of what you’re going to see in the book and then you get some pretty insane stuff shown in that same style which makes it a bit more shocking and a bit more surprising.

Once again, I found myself needing a bit of a break after reading through these 13 issues so I’m probably going to throw up another Trade Post for Friday, but I’m already back into the series with about half of the third volume read just last night. There’s a lot going on and I think I’m about done with all the parts I actually remember from the series so this should be interesting.