While the live-action Y: The Last Man series is about to start on FX on Hulu, the classic Vertigo comic still left some giant lingering questions.
As with any post-apocalyptic story including viruses, plagues or anything else that almost renders humanity extinct, one major narrative thread in Y: The Last Man had to do with identifying the actual cause of the disease that killed everyone on Earth with a Y chromosome. In Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s classic Vertigo series, Yorick and his monkey, Ampersand were the only mammals with a Y chromosome left alive after the mysterious ailment that killed roughly half of the world.
While several potential reasons for the mass casualty event were given, none were ever confirmed over the comic’s 60-issue run. So before FX on Hulu brings Y: The Last Man to life, we’re taking a closer look at some of the reasons the book put forward for the extinction event.
The Cursed Amulet
The early part of the story focused on America’s Agent 355 taking a relic from Jordan — an amulet that was said to be mystical. However, religious zealots warned her once it was removed from the Middle East nation, a blight would all upon the planet. This was said to be payment for men kidnapping Helen of Troy in the past, however, 355 did it anyway to stop it from falling into some terrorists’ hands.
Right as she broke borders, the world descended into chaos, leaving fans wondering if this really was the case. Ironically, Yorick bought a ring from a magical items dealer to propose to his girlfriend, Beth, who was studying in Australia at the time, which left him thinking maybe this ring kept him alive. However, all these trinkets would become trivial in the plot, with even Yorick and 355 making fun of the superstitions later on.
The China Attack
Yorick was hunted by Israeli assassins, led by a war general called Alter. She would reveal that she needed him as he was part of a bigger cog in a possible world war. She confessed the Culper Ring, a secret war society America had that used agents like 355, actually concocted a special nerve gas to devastate China’s economy.
In the series, the U.S. wanted to stymie China’s population and growth as a world power, but the chemical attack backfired with the gas backfiring and killing males all across the world. Alter was convinced that Yorick may have had something in his genes that made him impervious,s but she got lost along the way, wanting him dead to end the war she fought within. In his scripts for the series, Vaughn indicated that this was the official cause, but this was never confirmed in the comic itself.
Nature Fought Back
At one point, Yorick was sent to Allison, a scientist who was working on cloning in order to outshine her dad, Matsumori. When they eventually found her mom, she posited a different theory — that playing god angered nature. She said that when her husband made the first clone of Allison, something in nature was triggered, since it meant males weren’t needed to create life anymore.
Not unlike The Happening, they just died out as Mother Nature felt men became obsolete. It was certainly outlandish and didn’t explain Yorick and Ampersand, although Allison did determine Ampersand’s poop had special chemicals that made the capuchin and Yorick resistant. When they found Matsumori, he also offered a new spin on this, suggesting the chemical he sent to kill Allison’s clone inside her stomach warped, and nature decided it should kill all males.
The Other Explanations
Yorick, 355 and Allison would meet so many opinionated people and conspiracy theorists, they just got a ton of reasons for the pandemic. The feminist radical Amazons thought the Earth hated men and wanted them dead for their destructive ways; some Christians felt this was the Rapture and that God struck men down for the Bible’s original sin; while some Aboriginal Australians told Beth this was also a celestial move.
Other terrorists felt it was a government cover-up for the elites to cull the populace, and lastly, the “Fish & Bicycle” traveling theater troupe assumed it happened because women had been oppressed and left out the performing arts. Again, Yorick’s team never took any of these seriously, even if some of these ideas could not be entirely discounted.
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