Y: The Last Man, Volume 3: One Small Step
Vol. 3 of Y: The Last Man is split into two parts. The first is the titular "One Small Step," which features our protagonists meeting a Russian named Natalya who is desperately trying to reach Kansas for the landing of the International Space Shuttle capsule Soyuz, which contains three astronauts. Two of them are men. They've been stuck in space three months longer than they should have been, and they're about to make an emergency landing at one of the US's Hot Suites, a safehouse designed to protect its inhabitants from viral or bacterial contaminants. Yorick is extremely pleased that he will no longer be the last man on Earth, as he feels woefully ill-suited to the task. Meanwhile, the Israeli special forces team that is hunting Yorick at the request of his mother, goes a little rogue. The leader, Alter Tse'Elon, decides to keep Yorick for Israel. Alter thinks like a soldier and not like a human being. She is totally annoying. Things escalate from there.
The second part of Vol. 3 is a two issue story called "Comedy & Tragedy," about the writing of the first play about the post-men era. Yorick and Co. are barely involved, and yet, little diversions like this one are part of the reason I love the series. It turns into this meta-meditation on life and art, and it acts kind of like a microcosm for the series as a whole. At one point, the playwright is talking about Mary Shelley's less famous work, The Last Man, and she says:
"The plague? She never really gets around to explaining it, but it's not the point of her story. It's a condemnation of the . . . the unchecked masculinity that was always threatening to destroy the planet. It's about the failure of art and imagination to save the world."
And that about sums it up.Yorick, 355, and Natalya fail to save the two male astronauts, and Yorick's hope is basically put to death (although the female, Ciba, is pregnant, and it might be a little boy). Vaughan also sticks it to Yorick at the end of "Comedy & Tragedy" when the playwright, Cayce, has her mythical last man commit suicide, "letting the women save themselves." This is no brave new world that Yorick is living in. It's fucking dank.