Y and Time and Memory

And I'm reading Y the Last Man, for the first time in a long time, and I'm seeing its place in comic history as well as my personal history. Realizing that cultural artifacts and entertainment based nostalgia trips exist as these dots on our personal timelines, that loom huge and then slowly sink back into the background as we continue to be swept forward into a blurry future, our treasured artistic attachments become our blurry past, we get used to saying "X is my favorite book" at parties, even when it's been a decade since we read it and if we were hard pressed to talk about it with someone who was in the middle of it at the moment we'd probably stammer out the oldest response we can remember on the subject and try to change the topic. I don't know if that's "we" meaning "me" or "we" meaning "we", but I think we get the point.





Y The Last Man came out 12 years ago. After realizing this fact I think about who I was 12 years ago and immediately shutter. Not just for the chasm that exists between my past self and me in terms of personal growth, but how different the worlds are, both great and small. Everyone who wasn't married yet. Everyone who was still alive.

I think about its place in my personal history. Was it the first gift that I ever gave Hannah, my collection of Y trades? At her birthday party at the Japanese restaurant, with all her friends from Umass. Everyone was still together then.

Y being also a comic that I have now spent long enough away from to fall in love with it all over again. Especially since one of the major personal changes during that time apart (yes, time apart can be used to describe a heart breaking college relationship break up or the time you spend away from a comic book) has been a huge improvement in my reading and writing skills. When I read Y for the first time it was for pure getting stoned, laying on the couch, wide eyed, thrill ride of a sunny day comic book reading adventure experience of "holy shit" and "totally awesome". The feeling you get after reading a comic and having to call up anyone who ever talked to you about it to scream into the phone, "YES! YES! I TOTALLY GET IT NOW! HOLY SHIT! ALL THE PARTS! BUT ESPECIALLY THAT ONE! YES!"

I try not to confuse my young adult experiences with comic books in that really boring, old person way of saying things like "Well everything was better before." Granted, Vertigo was better off 12 years ago, that can be written off as opinion but it also can be discussed as fact. I know that the way I felt about books like Preacher or Transmetropolitan had a lot to do with who I was and where I was at beyond their intrinsic cultural and artistic significance. Just because I don't have a love crush on a comic coming out right now, doesn't mean there isn't work being produced today that isn't on par or greater than those books. (Well except for Preacher obviously.)(Well and Transmet, obviously.)(Books today really are rubbish though! Amirite?!?) Hashtag knowing wink.

This time through reading it I'm approaching the work more like a piece of art, and with every panel on every page finding more and more to appreciate, wonder at, treasure and learn from.

Shit, all this navel gazing and I haven't even thought about how different Vertigo was 10+ years ago. For starters, Vertigo was still a thing. There's a reason that most of the names that built the house left to go everywhere else. A non-smoking, John Con-stan-teen on NBC is the perfect emblem of nu-Vertigo. The simple, perfect effigy of everything that went wrong. Like some beautiful Jonathan Hickman script, where everything goes wrong and evil wins.

But Vertigo in '02/'03 you're still getting loads of really smart, really weird stories. Mike Carey's quiet masterpiece Lucifer is still screamin' and blasphemin' along, Fables was just starting out and had so many great years ahead of it before crappy television producers picked its bones clean and the comic itself became a parody of itself yet remained completely blind of the fact. Grant Morrison's The Filth was still fisting the brain's sanity hole with nazi dolphins and enough meta-commentary to make Charlie Kauffman go blind. And Hellblazer was still a thing. A beautiful, special, damned thing.

I've just finished the first story arc of Y The Last Man and I've got good comic buzz all over, just like the first time but better. It's true what they say! The old people! When they say that it gets better with age! Who knew? The old folks were right with their trite cliches!

It's no surprise that Vaughn has had success in television after revisiting those introductory Y issues, it moves just like a tightly plotted, expertly directed television show of the highest quality. And like most comics it remains far, far, far, far better on the page than it does on any screen (unless of course you're reading it digitally, in which case that's a whole 'nother article to be sure). The art, the characters, the plot, it all unwinds perfectly, giving you important plot points in ways so subtle you don't even notice them. Did you know that the first time I read Y I completely missed most of the Dr. Mann plot points along the way, I think I was so jazzed on Yorrick and 355's misadventures that my brain just straight up ignored the Dr. Mann angles until that was impossible. Of course earlier I did state that I was reading them stoned so I could've just forgot about it.

"When your memory goes, forget it."-Utah Phillips