4 out of 5

I know, I know.  I’m supposed to give this five stars.  Seeing the things I have given five stars, I probably should.  Vaughan’s writing on his adult longer running series – Ex Machina, Y – has always been consistently entertaining, well-paced, and worth it, issue per issue.  While month to month with Y there was definite feeling of fill-in issues (the Fish & Bicycle stuff, which was appropriately meta in its fill-in-ness) that seemed to just prolong progress on the plot, reading it in one go it’s not as offensive, and the expansion of the side characters in the world is much appreciated.  But, though Bri is filled with so much fun factoids, I haven’t really been too affected by his writing, either on an emotional level or on a level that makes me sit and think about what’s what.  (I say that, but Y totally had a heart-breaking moment late in the game, though, again, reading it in one go it’s sort of an aspect of the plot that’s foisted on us, and I’m not sure that it was necessary except for the punctuation it gives the climax.)

Yes, Y has the ultimate mystery of What Caused Everything, but it’s not something I feel the need to scour boards to see what people are thinking about it, and when I finished the series at the time, a fellow reader and I were both happy with it, but didn’t really engage in too much comic talk.  Brian’s writing just doesn’t invite that so much, for some reason.  In this sense he is, to me, the Tarantino of the comic world.  I will more than likely buy any creator-owned series he puts his name on.  Experience has taught me that his handling of others’ properties doesn’t always shake out to much, but in his own world, he crafts such an excellent story that it is always worth the ride of the cover price, which isn’t something I can honestly say for a lot of books.  Even things I dig reading frequently, like Hellboy, I wouldn’t say you shouldn’t just wait for the trades (wouldn’t… shouldn’t…), whereas with Y, and Ex Machina, and now Saga, I feel like there’s an awareness of the joy of holding these slim books in your hands, of flipping pages, of reading.  That’s not to knock any of the other awesome comics I read, of course, but just as I’m happy to pay the dollars to see a Tarantino flick on the big screen because it FEELS like a movie, Brian’s writing (or the stories he’s put out to which I refer) belongs in comic form.

In case you’re catching up, Y opens with a plague that kills every male human and animal on the planet… Save one 22 year old, Yorick Brown, and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand.  What Vaughan establishes from issue one that makes this something sustainable for the 59 issues that follow is that… the Why isn’t really that important.  This is the spin that Garth Ennis took with Crossed, where, sure, you explore it a bit, because characters in the story will naturally want to know the reason, but if you build everything around solving a mystery, not only does it diminish the power of the other elements – like characters – but it will inevitably lead to a shrug.  And Vaughan is such a fun character writer (though they do mostly all speak with a variation on sarcastic, pop-culture aware pseudo-adults) that if he forced us away from that (which is sort of what happened with Pride of Baghdad), everything else would suffer.

Not that plotting isn’t a strength of Brian’s as well, but that aspect of things is more classical feeling, laid out very effectively.  You’re never worried about where the story is going, you have faith that it’s been planned out to get to point X, Y and Z by issue whatever and whatever, whereas his grasp of humanity in his dialogue produces some very pure moments that are so naturalistic that they work… and sound just as silly and hopeful and stupid and smart as any line you’ve heard a friend utter offhand, unaware of the depth of what they’re saying.  (Wait, do I actually have friends like that?  I think I just made that up.)

Anyhow, this sounds like nothing but praise, but I want to return to is that feeling of not being too moved.  It’s a great story.  And easy to offer to any non-comic reader as evidence of how much fun and satisfying reading comics can be.  But despite the great characters along the way, and the unique path Yorick takes as he says fie to the apocalypse and searches for his girlfriend who was taking a sojourn in Australia at the time of the great de-manning, it still doesn’t amount to much more than entertainment.  You’ve had conversations that sound like this before, about men and women and gender issues.  Brian just spun it into something fun to read.