Alex Spencer

This weekend I finished Y the Last Man for the first time — figured I should give it a read now that that adaptation actually has legs — and it gave me a lot of interesting thoughts. (Context: I read the whole plot on Wikipedia so I was mentally prepared for a Weird Ending.)

First off, it is not a story without its problems. It’s remarkable how dated it is — not because it’s behind the times necessarily but because so much has changed. Our broad understanding of the reality of gender and sexuality, for one thing.

And some of the facts it hangs its plot arcs on — that there are no female American soldiers who’ve seen ground combat, that Australia is the only nation that allows women to serve on submarines — are no longer true!

But while reading it I felt like I was watching Vaughan learn, in real time, lessons about how to craft a satisfying open-ended adventure story that he was going to apply to Saga and Paper Girls to GREAT effect.

Clearly a lot of the frustration of the ending of Y is that it doesn’t firmly answer the questions that see most important at the beginning of Y — I can understand why readers would be disappointed, but it’s also super clear that that is the whole point.

Fast forward an look at Saga, which has a narrator who boldly tells you right off the bat: This is not a story about the end of this war. I don’t have a destiny. I’m just a person. This is just my family. Audience expectations: Managed.

But the thing that most excited me about reading it in the context of a film adaptation, is that the problems that exist in Y could all EASILY be solved through the process of adaptation.