I know I’m massively behind the times in reading this, but as I’m currently working on a similar narrative, several people recommended this graphic novel as a good place to look at how a gender-imbalanced dystopia played out. Interesting ideas, some lessons learned, and a few pitfalls to avoid.

On a day in 2002, a mystery virus simultaneously kills off every creature with a Y chromosome on the planet. Apart from one. Yorick (his parents liked Shakespeare) and his monkey Ampersand, are the only males left alive on the planet.

It’s a neat premise, that leads to a range of far-reaching narratives. There’s loads to explore, and the comic uses split narratives and unusual time-framing to quickly absorb us into the various effects all over the world. It acknowledges the immediate economic and political collapse, as these are areas almost completely dominated by men. The planes that would drop out of the sky, the trains that would crash, the nuclear plants that would suddenly be under threat.

But, where is the resilience? I refuse to believe that half of the species would simply sit about and get hungry. There are a huge number of women in a range of very practical professions, and the cavalier response to disaster just felt a little weak, as if over-exaggerating the impact it would have. Don’t get me wrong, it would be huge initially, but there is technology, systems in place, and the lack of order in the book smacked of the ‘helpless female’ stereotype I hoped this book would try to avoid.

The story is fast-paced and the characters interesting, leading to The Last Man embarking on a journey to discover why he was immune, and how he could find the secret and therefore, save the planet. With him are a secret agent and a doctor, who provide more nuanced characters than the rest, and give a foil for the often arrogant Yorick to bounce against. As a relative newcomer to graphic novels, I found it a really enjoyable read. Of course it is telling a female story, but ultimately, it is the man that is setting out to save the world, which was a little disappointing.

There were other problems with it. At times it was a little stylised. All of the people that we hear from in the story are beautiful, everyone from convicts to guerrilla fighters. Despite being in a world without men, we still had hugely sexualised female characters. The garbage collector just happens to be an ex-model, and we are given a very minimal range of female characters. I suppose with so many narrative threads running through, it’s hard to get completely rounded characters, and so far I have only read the first edition. However, for a world without men, I would have much preferred to have more variation on the scale from ‘nice girl’ to ‘psycho bitch/butch lady’, with a couple of ‘intelligent’ women thrown in for good measure. For a book that’s re-examining the world as we know it, I would like to think they could move outside existing tropes of femininity. I also didn’t understand why we couldn’t look beyond simple gender binary, with all the women apparently falling over themselves to be with Yorick. It was an opportunity to look outside these simple pairings, and I think it missed a trick.

Having said that, the level of violence is, in a way, refreshing. Far from the ‘mother earth’ nonsense that often turns up in feminine utopias, we see struggles for power, killing and chaos in the aftermath of the disease. It’s good that it acknowledges these things are human problems, not male problems. Desire for control and a search for understanding in the world is what preoccupies everyone, and it often leads to fatal conflict. Why should men not being around make any difference? Having said that, the Amazons were infuriating. Ridiculous characters with no believable back story, they form a sort of anti-male cult. Which, apart from anything else, is now entirely pointless. It seems they only exist to give Yorick something to run away from. A lazy plot device that sticks to the ‘feminists as psychos’ trope.

There are plenty of hooks dropped in to make you want to carry on reading the series. The reason the men died, a scientific accident, some loopholes drifting above the stratosphere, there is plenty of story here.

I just found it a little, showy. Yes it’s very compelling, I genuinely cared about the characters, but I felt too often the hand of the writer, creating plot twists with a little ‘ta da!’ in the background. Maybe comics aren’t for me, as the reviews I’ve read say that this is a refreshing break from stereotypical characters, so what must the other stuff be like?

Anything that questions gender politics is good in my book, but let’s try and do something a bit more complex next time. It opened up a lot of possibilities and questions for the world I’m currently creating (watch this space!) which is definitely what I was after. Perhaps we have just moved on a little from 2002. I would like to think so. Perhaps a version of this comic now would try to shock us in different ways.

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