Other women are less troubled with their new surroundings and consider it the start of a new utopia. “We’ve got to pick up where those boys left off,” she tells a disguised Yorick, rather cheerfully. In one scene, a woman laments the death of rock’n’roll – the Who, U2, Radiohead and the remaining Beatles are all suddenly gone. Ninety-five per cent of the US’s ship captains and truck drivers are gone, and with Australia, Norway and Sweden being the only countries that allow women to serve on submarines, the seas fall suddenly quiet (Y: The Last Man was published in 2002, a whole decade before the UK and the US began allowing women in the navy). The US suddenly has no ground troops Israel, which has compulsory military service for all young women, is suddenly comparatively powerful. Most of the world’s billionaires and landowners are suddenly dead, as are 85% of government representatives and 100% of imams, Orthodox Jewish rabbis and Roman Catholic priests. As airline pilots are overwhelmingly male, almost all planes drop out of the sky, killing thousands. Strange counterfactuals emerge in Vaughan’s tale, as a result of the very real disparities we live with every day. Photograph: DC ComicsĪlas, poor Yorick – and his pet monkey Ampersand – must venture out into this new, deadly world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |