The Last Man: Cycles

[sawyl]

I'm beginning to suspect that I might have too much time on my hands, having recently read the second Y: The Last Man trade, despite doing a whole bunch of other stuff.

While riding the train to Dr Mann's backup lab in California, Yorick, Agent 355 and the doc manage to get themselves chucked out of their boxcar in a way that leaves 355 unconscious. They find themselves in the charming, efficiently run town of Marrisville Ohio, where Yorick has a Back to the Future moment with a chick called Sonia. When Sonia finally explains to Y that not everything in Marrisville is as it seems, he reacts in his usual ill-judged way and, just as he's doing his whole moral superiority thing, the Daughters of the Amazon turn up to make things a whole lot worse.

Cycles is a fun little read with some seriously nice artwork, that expands on a lot of the stuff set up in the first trade. The confrontation between Y and his sister Hero was nicely handled, the way that they disagreed about which one of them their father liked most, how she pointed the way that Yorick comes out with all this clever sounding stuff but doesn't really know where it comes from, stuff like that. There were also some serious hints of things to come: the Russian woman who attempted to tell the Daughters of the Amazon about the "men from space", Alter's continued quest for Y, 355's unfinished Amulet of Helene mission, Dr Mann's history of Pilates — I definitely want to hear more about that — and a closing panel that showed a bunch of guys preparing a Soyuz for landing. Maybe the Russian woman wasn't talking about little grey men from Mars after all...