See, when the solicitations said "Hero's Journey," I thought we were going to get a story of Hero going after Yorick, maybe something picking up on how she got out of jail and going forward from there. Instead, we truly get her journey, from youth through teenage years to young adulthood to where she wound up now, and the result is a terrific piece of character introspection that answers some questions and concerns I had about the character since she was reintroduced and makes her place in the story again very ambiguous and interesting. This one-shot story is one of my favorite Y: The Last Man tales in the last few months, and given how much I love this book on a monthly basis, that's saying something.
Vaughan's style compares easily to that of Aaron Sorkin, creator of the West Wing, something I've noticed on his other book, Ex Machina, as well. Not just in terms of dropping in bits of trivia he found out into the character's dialogue, but in terms of structure and the way he uses flashbacks. This issue slips seamlessly through Hero's life, jumping from one short sequence to another, but each sequence reinforces the point of the story so that it's a cohesive whole rather than a handful of short stories. In the space of one issue, we see key moments in Hero's life and how she got here, and it never feels like we're being short-changed or asked to swallow something unbelievable.
One of my reservations about the book early on was that Hero's conversation from relatively sweet sister to cold-blooded amazon seemed a little hard to swallow. Having seen the backstory, though, I can now see that Vaughan has created a character who could make that shift. The coincidence of Victoria's name is well within believable tolerances, and the fact that Hero had something of a screwed-up way of relating to men, not to mention the time-honored notion of starvation weakening the mind, all leads me to believe Hero's conversion to amazon far more than I ever did before. In addition, I love that where the story leaves her now has her as a more ambiguous figure; is she in fact going to help Yorick, or will she wind up going down as one of the villains of the series? I can now see it going either way, and can't wait to see which way it goes.
While Vaughan deserves plenty of credit for his usual sharp dialogue and pacing, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that Guerra is really on her game in this issue. There's some spectacular storytelling going on when it comes to the emotions on characters' faces, quiet moments that are all Guerra and Marzan Jr. Yorick's crying in the opening sequence, the happy look that crosses Hero's face in the teenage sequence, her confusion and instability in the latter half of the book, these are all moments that rely on the artist to take the storytelling reins. Also, it's a small thing, but I was quite impressed that Guerra could do realistic acne on Hero without making her look like a zombie or something.
There's just a lot to like about this issue. Vaughan neatly deconstructs the nature of familial politics and relationships and traces the life of a young woman from girlhood to adulthood, and does it all in the space of one issue. While Y: The Last Man is about Yorick, the last man on Earth, it's also about the larger story of the loss of all the men and how that affects the women left behind, and nowhere has that been more clear than in this issue, where the modern-day Yorick never appears and the focus is entirely on a supporting cast member, and the result is one of the strongest issues the book has had.
