sawyl | The Last Man: Whys and Wherefores (Reply)

I've just finished Whys and Wherefores, the last trade in Brian K Vaughan's consistently excellent Y: The Last Man series. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to say too much about what actually transpires, but I think I've got room to make a few points without giving too much away.

The resolutions of the various plot lines seemed to me to be very much in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the story. There were no cheap attempts to force characters into strange poses; no dei ex machina to pull things back into shape, to resurrect all the dead men or to create a perfect (almost) completely female utopia; none of the hard decisions were ducked. But the underlying message of the series — something probably best summed up in Polonius' advice to Laertes: to thine own self be true — shone through it all.

For it seems to me that Y: The Last Man could be read as an argument in favour of the authentic life. Consider the main characters and their initial behaviour at the start of the plague. By living according to the rules imposed on them by society and by outside pressures, they're all living inauthentic and unhappy lives. Yorick is a slacker who feels like he's failing to live up to his family's expectations; Dr Mann is frantically trying to create a clone in a frantic attempt to excel her father; while 355 seems to have rejected her humanity in favour of her duties to the Culper Ring. Following the plague and the consequent removal of expectations, the character are free to grow and to become the people they truly are. Think of the metaphor of 355's scarf. The growth of the scarf is akin to the growth of 355's authentic self, with the unpicking and reknitting of sections akin to the slow process of self-perfection and self-understanding.

Anyway, that's my existential take on it and I'm sticking to it. Plus, I thought the bald Yorick Brown looked so like