y_the_last_man_largeA couple of years ago, I fell in love with Brian K. Vaughan’s and Pia Guerra‘s , Y: The Last Man. I had recently finished reading Preacher by Garth Ennis, which at the time, I had thought was the greatest comic series I have ever read. Reading Vaughan’s graphic novel, I had found one that topped it. It could be the dystopian future that I’m a fan of, it could be the amazing concept behind it, it could be the humor that ran throughout the storyline in the midst of seemingly non-humorous events. Whether it was one, or all of those things, I was a huge fan.

For those of you who haven’t read the novel, it’s about a future in which a plague kills nearly all males. Escape artist Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand survive as the only creatures left with Y chromosomes, forced to navigate their way through post-apocalyptic gender politics. Women self-inflict mastectomy’s as ways to show their love to Gaia, russians-fight-secret agents-fight-amazons, and the last man on Earth has to keep himself secret for fear of being murdered. Not only that, when he does get revealed, the women have to decide to either kill him, or sleep with him. The story is crazy!

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For all of my love of Vaughan and Guerra’s work, it’s a little scary to hear that there will be a movie adaptation of my beloved comic series. Today, we learn that director, Dan Trachtenberg, has been announced to bring the comic to the big screen. Trachtenberg is a first-time filmmaker whose previous work includes a short based off the popular, Portal, video game series. You can check out a video from that below.

You can tell that Trachtenberg has talent, but his directing skills are not what I have the problem with. I’m more upset that New Line Cinema is deciding to turn this comic book SAGA into a 2hour film. It’s going to be impossible to grasp the concept of the what Vaughan and Guerra have created in that short amount of time. I feel that the character development will be threadbare at best, and there will be so much plot cut out, that it can’t nearly satisfy fans of the novel.

Granted, there’s a lot of things that I wouldn’t mind see go. Most of the stuff with the Israeli army can be cut down, and if you leave out the girlfriend plot altogether, you can still make a pretty cool flick. So, there is some hope if they can do it correctly; I would just feel better about the adaptation if it was on a cable television network for 12 episodes.

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We’ll keep you posted as more Y: The Last Man news comes in at DFAT; and if you haven’t read the novel yet, pick it up. You will not be disappointed Vaughan is currently working on a new series called, SAGA; and from the first 7 issues that I have read, it’s going to be another great journey! You can start getting those at your local comic shop, or at TFAW.com.

~Chaz