I went to a used book store the other day and was very surprised to find a 2 collected issues of Y-The Last Man and a copy of Adrian Tomine’s Sleepwalk: And Other Stories.
Sleepwalk: And Other Stories is a collection of the first 4 issues of Adrian Tomine’s comic series Optic Nerve. 16 short stories centered around similar themes of social isolation, loneliness, and loss make up this collection. Tomine chooses to focus on character development rather than presenting a cut-and-dry narrative. You are suddenly dropped into the middle of these character’s lives and forced to imagine a backstory for each person. This tactic works very well. I read the entire comic in about an hour and had to bite my lip a few times to keep from tearing up. A depressing read but well worth the money.
Y-The Last Man just rules. Seriously, shaping up to be one of my favorite stories. A short gist of the storyline (courtesy of wikipedia):
“In the series, on July 17, 2002, something (speculated to be a plague) simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome – including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. The only exceptions appear to be Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey Ampersand.
Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men, their survivors’ guilt, and the knowledge that humanity is doomed to extinction. Vaughan meticulously crafts the new society that emerges out of this chaos, from the conversion of the phallic Washington Monument into a monument to the dead men, to the genesis of the fanatical ultra-feminist Daughters of the Amazon, who believe that Mother Earth cleansed itself of the “aberration” of the Y chromosome, to male impersonators becoming valued romantically and professionally.
Over the course of their journey, Yorick and his friends discover how society has coped in the aftermath of the plague. However, many of the women they encounter have ulterior motives in regard to Yorick. Though the subject matter of the series is entirely serious, Y: The Last Man is also noted for its humor. Yorick in particular is a source of one-liners, although the other characters have their moments as well.”
The series is also being turned into a movie.
Tags: Adrian, comics, sleepwalk, tomine, y: the last man
