This short arc of Y: The Last Man opened with the intriguing question of "what would art look like in a world without men?" The answer, unfortunately, is pretty much the same, only the women are playing men's roles. Vaughan tells an interesting story of another isolated town, giving us a look at the wider world of Y just as he did with the town of Marrisville in "Cycles," but given the more exciting events that dominated the previous arc, it feels a little bit like spinning his wheels. This is sort of a side story, and it adds some necessary meat onto the bones of the post-apocalyptic world that Vaughan and his co-creators have built, but it is definitely among the weaker Y stories so far.
Of course, Vaughan has absolutely captured the feel of community theatre in his work on this arc. The bickering, the put-upon producer/playwright, the demanding (and mildly vapid) actors, the outraged community when you veer at all from the standards... it may be the post-apocalypse, but it looks like the show must go on, much as it did before. The subject matter of the play, including a particularly funny scene when the women charge the "last man," is unusual and entertaining, but the general nature of the interaction will be recognizable to anyone who has ever done time in theatre.
This is really an arc about adaptation, about how seemingly frivolous or small things can help ease the total devastation of daily life. Just as Cayce talks to her actors about how their play is an allegory, this specific situation can be read as a general allegory for how life is going on in the world without men in Y: The Last Man. If theatre can survive, altered but hardly unrecognizably so, then it's fairly easy to imagine that the rest of the world continues in a seemingly similar but disturbingly, subtly different way.
The problem is that a subtly altered world is not quite as in-your-face and interesting as renegade women who are glad men are gone, forgotten Russian cosmonauts or a town full of prison escapees. Vaughan introduces a couple of nods to the main story, with a ninja character answering to a mysterious and ominously named "Dr. M" and the reintroduction of the core cast near the end to bring Ampersand back into the fold, but the general feel here is very much something that's a space filler. Those who found the Amazons to be an unnecessarily outrageous concept may enjoy the more grounded style of this arc, but I was longing for a little more weirdness and wit that has defined the book for me so far.
On the art score, despite a guest artist, things remain pretty much the same. Paul Chadwick's artwork, with Marzan's inks, looks very much like Pia Guerra's, which extends to distinct and believable real people, clothing and backdrops. There's also some nice action with the perfect comedic touch when the play's fight scene devolves into an actual fight scene, and the gas-masked entry of our familiar band has a nice surreal feel to it as well.
