Broken Frontier

Yorick and Agent 355 have found Ampersand, but elsewhere Dr. Mann receives a shock that turns the story of the plague on its ear.

Nearly a year and a half ago Dr. Allison Mann discovered that Ampersand (or part of him anyway) was the reason for his and Yorick’s impossible survival of the worldwide decimation of the Y chromosome. Shortly thereafter, Ampersand was kidnapped by a crazy ninja lady and taken across the Pacific to Tokyo. Though the journey was long and the search exhaustive, Yorick and his troop caught up with those holding Ampersand. However, the crazy ninja lady was still hanging around, lurking in the shadows and waiting to strike at her real target: Dr. Mann’s mother.

The first few issues of the Kimono Dragons arc gave me the feeling that the story was treading water, so to speak. Every move seemed to be a shadow play to progress the plot ever so slightly toward what the writer has already explained would be the end of Y: The Last Man at around issue number sixty. Each of the issues of the arc leading to this one were still quite enjoyable and clever with their multiple twists and the usual cutting and often humorous dialogue, but none really gave the readers that earth-shattering revelation that we’ve come to know and love about the series. Here, though, Vaughan throws us a curveball that we should have seen coming but did not. While more questions arise from this revelation, it’s one of those story moments that grabs the reader by the throat and demands him or her to reexamine the previous forty-five issues.

I’ve reviewed this book often over the past several years, and each time I sound like a broken record. Whether Pia Guerra or Goran Sudzuka provide pencils, they always give tightly detailed sequential art and each excels with anatomical rendering. If I’m not mistaken, though, this is the first time the two artists have worked within the same issue. I found no page breakdowns on who did what pages, but from the looks of things Guerra provided all but the final three pages. The only way to tell (that I can see) is in the faces of the characters—females in particular. While both offer highly expressive features, Guerra crafts slightly more hardened feminine features, whereas Sudzuka brings a softer side with haunted eyes and fuller lips. The only reason to point any of this out is the highlight how incredibly similar the two are, which is a great commodity for any book.

Just over a year left now. The gang is headed to China, in search of answers they thought they already had. Who or what they find there is hard to say, but this issue above any other in the past year has reinstalled my faith that it will be worth the journey.