 So, this is my 100th review that I've ever done on this channel, except, well, I've actually done, like, compilations and whole series and stuff, so really, I've reviewed more than 100 books, but whatever, I wanted to do something special for my 100th, and I couldn't think of anything, so instead, I read Why the Last Man. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So, this one is a graphic novel series, and it's been a long time since I reviewed one of those, but, you know, I do enjoy reading them now and again, but they're, you know, they're different from books, so it's a little bit harder to talk about them. But, uh, at the end of the day, this was pretty good, okay? It had an amazing setup and had a lot of stuff along the way that I thought was also pretty great. I loved seeing this new world and how things went out. I loved some of the characters, but by the end, it kind of lost focus, and then it kind of ran out of steam, and at the end, it just sort of petered out rather than, well, ending, really. So, the setup for this one is very simple. One day, all of the men in the world just die. Like, they start spitting up blood, and then they keel over and die. But, not just the men, also, all of the male fetuses, all of the sperm that held the Y chromosome, and all the mammals, so all the dogs, cats, monkeys, whatever, they all die, except for one guy named Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. And, at the beginning, we don't know what caused it. Like, we have a few ideas, and there are a few clues there, and figuring out what caused it is a major part of the story, sort of. But, we know that he is still alive, and so he goes off, runs into, you know, politicians and scientists and all that in this world that is falling apart, basically. And, they see him, and they're like, well, how did he survive? Let's figure it out. And so, they go on this long journey to figure out, one, what caused the plague, two, how to end it so that they can bring the men back and prevent humanity from going extinct. Like I said, this is a simple setup, and it's honestly a pretty great one. The beginning of this series, like the first, I'd say around 10 to 15 issues, are just fucking phenomenal. Like, absolutely great as far as openings go. Like, if you want to know how to begin a story well, like, read the beginning of Why the Last Man. Like, this is how you draw in your audience. This is how you introduce, not a huge cast of characters, but a moderately large cast of characters, and give them all distinct personalities. Like, this is how you get people's attention and get them to keep reading. And, granted, had I been reading this one month at a time, as it was coming out, I probably would have stopped about halfway through because, like I said, it loses some focus, loses some steam. But reading it all at once, that goodwill that I had built up at the beginning carried me through all the way. Some other things I liked about this series, Yorick, the main character, I thought he was good. You know, at first he was kind of obnoxious, because, I mean, he really is just a regular dude at the end of the day. His only real skill is being an amateur magician, so he can, like, escape from straight jackets and handcuffs and stuff, which is useful, obviously. You know, you can see how that would be a nice skill to have in the apocalypse. But other than that, he is pretty dependent on others. Let's not say he's stupid, just that he's dependent on others. However, he does come across a little bit whiny and kind of really obsessed with his old girlfriend, which is a little obnoxious after a while, especially because the story takes place over the course of years. But, you know, it could be a lot worse. And after a little while, he does grow up a little. You know, he understands that, okay, things are different than they used to be. I need to change myself. I need to change my outlook on things. And I need to kind of not really stop whining, but I need to accept things how they are. And once he does that, he becomes a much better character. I also thought the art was pretty good. Now, obviously, I myself am not an artist, so I can't go into a lot of detail about how, oh, the blending color lines is good or anything like that. I can't do that. But I can say that the art, well, not spectacular, did get the point across pretty well. And most of the characters do look pretty distinct from one another. You know, they're all... I didn't mix them up at all. And there are occasionally little things in the background which are, you know, hints of what's to come. And yeah, it's good artwork. The villains are pretty fantastic in this too. Now, I'm not really going to talk about spoilers here. Don't worry. I'll do a spoiler section. Don't worry. But there are a couple of different groups that are after York for one reason or another. Like the first one you see are the Amazons, who are this group of basically just women who kind of sort of lost their minds after the apocalypse. And they're thinking how Mother Earth killed all the males for a reason. And how they need to kill off the last man. They're really just... they're crazy at the end of the day. But it's understandable how they could be that way. And they wind up not having as big a role in the story as I originally thought they would. But, you know, they're pretty cool villains when we see them. And then there's also, like, Israeli nationalists or Zionists. Actually, now that I say it, I don't think those two things are necessarily the same. But whatever. There's Israeli nationalists that are coming after them. There are just a lot of different groups that come after the characters for one reason or another. And, yeah, they're all individually pretty good. Like, none of them are amazing villains, I don't think, because none of them really gets enough time devoted to them to be amazing villains. In fact, I really wish they had just chosen one of the villains and focused on them the entire way through the story. I think that would have been a lot stronger. And it also would have helped keep the plot from losing focus partway through and then kind of losing steam later, like I said. But nonetheless, they're all still pretty good villains. I loved seeing this world and how it changed. Like, you know, obviously losing about half the population all at once would have some pretty severe effects. And that's not even taking into account how most of the pilots in the world are men. So most of the planes all crashed. And a lot of the world's leaders are men. So governments collapsed, even more than they would have already. And there are some countries where it collapses completely. There are some countries where it only sort of collapses, like the United States. And then there's other countries which seem to do okay all things considered, like Israel and New Zealand, because Israel actually has women in combat roles. So they have an effective military after all the men die, whereas most other countries don't. At least at first, because like I said, this takes place over several years. So some places kind of get their shit together and actually build themselves back up again. But the New World is obviously pretty substantially different from the one that died off. And so it's just neat for me to see that. Like, you know, it's a post-apocalyptic story. So obviously seeing the new societies that emerge and their new viewpoints on things is really, really cool. Another thing this series does is that even though it is pretty dark, don't get me wrong. And it does occasionally get kind of graphic. Like, there's not a whole lot of super graphic violence in here. Like, there's some violence, but it's mostly just like, oh, someone gets shot and you see blood and they fall. There are one or two moments where it gets pretty graphic, don't get me wrong. But really nothing all that bad. And there's not all that much sex or nudity in here either. Like, this could have easily turned into, oh, the last man on earth fucks everybody else in the world. And that just has sex with anything that moves. But they wind up not doing that. And granted, I think that part of the story could have been handled a little bit better. It's nice of them to not just turn this into porn basically, or just turn it into an adolescent fantasy. But despite all the dark stuff, which I was getting to, I kind of went off on a tangent there, despite all the dark stuff, this story is still pretty funny. Like, it has a nice sense of humor. You know, Yorick especially is a pretty witty dude and has some funny comebacks. He has some funny dialogue with his fellow travelers. Well, yeah, I don't have a whole lot else to say there. Like, it's just, yeah, there's some funny moments in here which bring some levity to the situation and keep it from being too self-serious, keep it from taking itself too seriously. Like, other dark series sometimes do. Like, Berserk is the first one that comes to mind as much as I like Berserk. It takes itself way too seriously sometimes and it just gets depressing. And this one avoids that mostly. And if you were looking for a series that has a lot of women in important roles and they aren't just in the background or non-existent, there are plenty of women in this series, obviously. Like, you know, with only one major character that's a man, the whole cast is going to obviously be women. So, and they have plenty of varied personalities. They aren't all the same. They aren't all helpless damsels or anything. They're honestly just a lot like men, you know. They can be paranoid. They can be insecure. They can be violent. They can be stupid. They can be smart. They can be good people. They can be bad people. You know, just that whole long list of traits that I could go on and on about all day. But like, you see women like that of all stripes and of all walks of life all over the world. So, if, yeah, like, that didn't make a huge difference for me personally. But if you were looking for that sort of thing, then you might enjoy this. So, overall, yeah, pretty good series. Not amazing, really. But there aren't any huge problems except for, you know, the plot running out of steam. And I will go into the spoilers section in a minute. But if you don't want to read that, or if you don't want to hear that, then Why the Last Man is pretty good. You know, it's a good graphic novel series. It's not all that long, really. So, like, I only took a couple of days to read it. It's an interesting premise and interesting, just, you know, it's interesting. You know, and there's a lot of good stuff in there to like. Just nothing really blew me away other than, you know, the beginning, which, again, is really fucking fantastic. But, um, yeah, it does lose steam after a while, so if that bothers you, then maybe don't check it out. But if the idea interests you at all, then go ahead and read it. Okay, so, spoiler section real quick. Um, the ending. I need to talk about the ending. So throughout this whole series, Yorick travels with a secret agent who just goes by 355, or 355. Like, she never gives her real name. Well, she gives it to him real briefly at the end, but we, the audience, don't see that. And anyways, there's never really any sort of spark or chemistry between them. Like, it never feels like they're in love at all. And then at the end, it just kind of comes out that, oh, hey, I love you. And she's like, what? And actually, before that, they had pretty much said that she was in love with him, too. But again, it never really felt that way. So, yeah, it just felt kind of dumb. And then 355 is killed. And then it... There's one last quick encounter with a villain, and then it skips ahead 60 years, and the world has been rebuilt. There are new men being born, all that. And Yorick is an old man, and he doesn't really like life anymore, and then he runs off, and that's the end. And I gotta say, the... Excuse me, the second to last chapter is pretty fantastic. Okay, like, finally seeing Yorick confront, alter the Israeli, and finally just finish what he started with her is really great. And even though he doesn't actually go through with it, he doesn't actually kill her because he realizes, oh, she's kind of in the same position I was a couple of years ago. She wants to die, so she's putting herself into situations where she thinks she will. And so I thought that was really good. And... But then it just sort of ends. Like, you know, the story had already mostly wrapped up, now that I'm thinking about it, because, like, they had already put together, like, cloning experiments and figured out how to make men immune to whatever it was that killed people, and we never actually get a clear answer on that, which is also kind of frustrating, but they had finally started building that, so it makes sense that, oh, yeah, I could skip forward and have all this happen, but it didn't really need to end on that depressing note there and then go into the hopeful stuff, and then the hopeful stuff gets depressing again because we see flashbacks of Yorick, well, he already lost his girlfriend before that, and then we also see, like, his monkey Ampersand died, and some of the other characters died, and it just...it feels weird, because, you know, normally with apocalyptic stories, they're either dark all the way through, or they're dark most of the way through, and then they get hopeful near the end, and in this one, it's dark all the way through, and then it tries to be dark and hopeful at the same time at the end, and it just feels weird, and it's very unsatisfying. Like, I think when I got to the last page, I literally just said, well, that's...that's it? And I don't think the series was canceled early, it might have been, I haven't checked, but it feels like it was canceled early. Like, it feels like the authors had some ideas of what they wanted it to end with, and then they were just told, hey, wrap it up, guys, we only got two issues left to do this, and so they kind of had to slap something together real quick. Like, it feels like that, and again, I don't know if that's the case, it very well could be otherwise, but yeah, it just...I didn't like the way it ended, it felt very unsatisfying, especially after such an amazing beginning and a decent enough middle. But, you know, if that still intrigues you after all that, like, there's still a lot of smaller spoiler stuff I didn't really talk about, which, you know, there are little plot twists and stuff that might interest you, so if that still interests you, then check it out. 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