Y: The Last Man (2002–2008) Y: The Last Man (2002–2008)WRITTEN BY Brian K. Vaughan
Illustrated by Pia Guerra
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN USA
This sixty-issue comic book series is set in the summer of 2002. A Brooklyn slacker dude named Yorick is on the phone with his girlfriend, Beth (who is visiting Australia), when—in the middle of proposing to her—nearly every creature on Earth with a Y chromosome (male humans and animals) dies from a bizarre unnamed plague. Yorick is the only human male who survives. He then sets off with his male pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, on a dangerous worldwide quest to reunite with his new fiancée.
After all of the men die off, the world's surviving women take over all of the males’ responsibilities: social, political, and otherwise. Lower-ranking female politicians get huge, spontaneous promotions—which is a huge shock in less-developed countries where societies had been male dominated. The women must also cope with the fact that humans may be doomed to extinction if they can't find a way to procreate. On Yorick's journey, he meets Secret Agent 355, a skilled female bodyguard who also becomes Yorick's traveling companion. Yorick spends much of his time on the road disguised as a woman to prevent anyone from finding out there's a remaining living member of the male species. Agent 355 introduces Yorick to a cloning pro named Dr. Allison Mann, who wants to use Yorick to produce cloned males. But Dr. Mann's lab was recently destroyed in a fire sparked by Israeli commandos, led by a woman nicknamed Alter. Dr. Mann encourages Yorick and Agent 355 to go to her second lab in California so she can start trying to clone him. They decide to go, but road travel is very slow, because food and fuel are scarce.
During the trip west, Yorick meets and becomes romantically involved with another woman named Beth; he eventually marries her instead of his former fiancée (whom he does eventually track down before realizing he loves the other Beth more). He also develops feelings for Agent 355. When he finally tells her this, toward the end of the series, they decide to give a romantic relationship a try. But just as Agent 355 whispers her real name into Yorick's ear, she is shot dead by Alter, leaving Yorick devastated.
More Written by Brian K. Vaughan
Runaways (comic series, 2003–2008)
Ex Machina (comic series, 2004–2010)
Lost (TV series, 2004–2010)
UNFORGETTABLE MOMENT
The first comic book closes with scenes of men dying all around the world. Blood drips from their eyes and spurts from their mouths as they spontaneously collapse in various scenarios, like keeling over at a desk at the Space Center in Texas and falling to the ground in the middle of refereeing a soccer game in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The strips also depict the shocked and terrified reactions of the women left standing, cradling the men's heads as they succumb to the mystery ailment.
It's after this that Yorick marries Beth, and they have a daughter who becomes the president of France, and Ampersand lives to become a ripe old monkey. Dr. Mann does succeed in cloning Yorick, but the men remain few and far between—and the world continues to be dominated by women.
EALITY FACTOR
It's pretty far-fetched for an epidemic to suddenly take out only the men in society, so the reality factor is low on this one. That being said, if it did occur, it's likely that it would cause some wide-scale problems and massive social upheaval.
The InspirationAuthor Brian K. Vaughan has said that his series was inspired by politics and by issues that engage the reader with the real world, and also by feminism: One of his goals was to write female characters that were stronger than those he had seen in other last-man-on-Earth scenarios. Some readers have speculated that the Yorick character may have been inspired by Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The young Hamlet famously ponders his mortality when he sees a gravedigger digging a grave that once belonged to his friend Yorick, a jester in his father's court.
The Impact
QUOTABLES 
“Those girls could be paratroopers or naval commanders, but men have taught them to be content behind a typewriter or radar screen. Not me.”
Alter, the leader of an Israeli commando unit and a villain in the comic, describing women who aren't as ballsy as she is
“It's too late. It's like this everywhere. My husband. My partner. All over the city. All over the world, maybe. It's the men … All of the men are dead.”
A policewoman says this to a distraught woman asking her for help at the start of the first comic because her little boys are throwing up blood from the plague