Y: The Last Man: Y – The Last Man Bd. 4. Offenbarungen: Bd 4 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Safeword” introduces a new character: Agent 711, a retired Culper Ring agent who’s also a friend of 355’s. She helps Yorick to take a deeper look at the reasons behind his compulsive recklessness, and it’s not pretty.
This part of the series was a little… iffy for me, for a variety of reasons. While the conclusion sets up some important events later in the series, the means by which its done is unnecessarily extreme, in my opinion. But I guess it’s more entertaining to most people than a simple sit-down conversation, especially considering the graphic novel format.
There’s some nudity in this volume, and, as I am a total prude, that didn’t exactly boost my enjoyment of this volume. And, while I enjoyed the series overall, I do think that it’s a contradictory message from Vaughan that the vast majority of the women in this post-apocalyptic world have rockin’ bodies — did the fat ones get eaten early on? And were non-form-fitting clothes also destroyed by the plague? You’d think that, with no men to impress, you’d see a lot more women wearing sweats.
It’s just interesting to me that, a lot of the time, he seems to preach about the empowerment of women, but that he also objectifies them at every step. It’s like he knows that most of his readers are going to be young men. He sticks in a few finger-wags about how hard women have it, but then retains his readership by making all of his women total babes who are fighting to save (or possess) this ordinary schlub.
This was an important volume in the series, but not really my favorite.
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