GRAPHIC NOVEL
Y: The Last Man
Cycles

Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Artist: Pia Guerra
Titan Books
RRP: £8.99
ISBN 1 84023 728 7
Available now


The time is now. Suddenly, and without warning, a mysterious plague kills every living living creature on the planet with a Y chromosome... for those of you who failed Biology, that means no more men. Except two. Yorick Brown and his pet monkey are the only male creatures to have survived. They now inhabit a very different world, and their unique status is far from privileged. They find themselves on the run from a coven of Amazons who want Yorick dead... and one of these women is his own sister...

Cycles sees Yorick on the move again as he constantly tries to outwit the various groups trying to track him down. But he has help in the form of a mysterious individual who is working for the government and a doctor involved with cloning.

This collection sees him taking refuge in an almost utopian village that is run by a group of women with a secret to hide. This volume reminded me of the TV drama Last Train, where the few London survivors of a nuclear holocaust discover a strange village in the middle of nowhere that seems too good to be true.

Again, like I mentioned with the last volume, the writer cleverly slips in the odd homage to a movie. And again just when you think you've spotted it, and you think he isn't going to mention the fact, Brian K. Vaughan steps in to show he was there ages before you. Last time it was the Nazi monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark. This time it's the scene where Marty wakes up in bed to be confronted by his younger mother in Back to the Future.

In addition to the main story there are a few pages added in at the back of this collection of rough sketches of different characters by Pia Guerra. I didn't realise before, but his drawings - uninked - have a Disney quality to them.

Another cracking collection.

Darren Rea

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