Pramod K Nayar explores how ecological disaster and multispecies survival is represented in Brian Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s graphic novel Y
Central to the apocalyptic vision of environmental graphic novels like Brian Vaughn-Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man (2020) is the theme of perishability and the human battle to evade, defer or survive it. Yorick, the sole male survivor of a biomedical disaster, becomes the hope for human futures, and so is chased by various groups and cults. Later, Yorick and Agent 355, tasked with protecting him, and Dr Allison Mann, a cloning specialist, travel to Australia and Japan to Dr Mann’s laboratories to find out the secret of his survival. Dr Matsumori, Dr Mann’s father, reveals that the secret of Yorick’s survival is the monkey Ampersand, who survived medical experimentation and his unexpected advantages/protection were transferred to Yorick when the latter came into possession of the monkey. Yorick is cloned many times by Dr Mann and the world continues.
The novel’s theme of human (male) perishability is cast in the aesthetic of the obliterative sublime. Steve Vine reading of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) identifies an aesthetic of the ‘catastrophically obliterative sublime’ which ‘is a radical, universal democratiser …It renders all the structures, demarcations and hierarchies of nations, races, classes, creeds, genders, political parties, political programmes and political discourses null and void’ (2006: 154).
Perishability is written into both medical and environmental catastrophe within Y. First, there is the biomedical disaster wherein the men alone die. Second, there is the drive to kill themselves – biomedical effect? environmental effect? – that afflicts women. Finally, there is the question of species balance when one half of the species is dead. These three provide also the foundation for the question: how did Yorick survive and can his survival-apparatuses, which would be his bodily matter, be medically harnessed to prevent human perishability. Vincent Bruyere in his Perishability Fatigue argues that the acknowledgement, management and occasionally even harnessing of perishability with a view to future life informs the creation of projects such as the Svalbard seed vault (2018). In the novel, cloning and medical technologies across species – monkeys and humans – become the means to restore and sustain the world’s ecological balance of the two genders, and thus ensure the survival of the species.
The natural and the social are the two scales of disaster that come together in Y, as Fuson Wang has noted of the ur-text, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man as well (Wang 2011). I suggest that such apocalyptic texts are driven by two powerful forces: the possibility inherent even in the apocalypse (which ties in with the idea that the apocalypse is that of a world ending so that another may open up, as Kate Rigby has noted, 2015), and science as enabling the governance of perishability.
Scales of Destruction
In Y, the local and the world intersect. In order to communicate the depth of the tragedy that is human perishability, the text engages in scale-making (Goebel and Manns 2020). It moves from the USA outward, that is literally across time zones. Y also invokes Israeli military action, the Australian outback, China and Japan. This serves as a representation of global perishability.
Repetition is central to the sublime. and this sublime aesthetic can be observed throughout Y.Gendericide occurs across time zones, species, cultures and spaces, indicating a scaling-up of the horror. The text also asks us to infer the scaled-up version of disaster by suggesting that even the death of only men across the planet will mean global disaster. The explanation of the gendericide hinges on a form of repetition. We discover later in the narrative that three males survive the plague: Yorick, the monkey Ampersand and Dr Matsumori. Vaughn and Guerra theorize that morphic resonance is a causal factor in the global gendericide, although it is never fully explained. Morphic resonance, a theory elaborated by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, makes a case for collective species memory in self-organizing systems where species remember (Robbins 2010). An important aspect of this (non-mainstream, controversial) theory is that the species memory builds up through repetition: with each iteration of the event/behaviour, the collective memory builds up. Secondly, the battle against perishability also hinges on repetition, this time through the biomedical intervention of cloning. Many Yoricks arise at the end of the novel, and they will be instrumental in repopulating the earth. Then of course there are the multiple mothers and acts of mothering. Thus, even as the disaster moves outward and in an expanded scale, it also points to the possibility of survival and survivors.
The Obliterative Sublime
The obliterative sublime (the concept which I outlined in my intro) in Y involves the human and the nonhuman, thus implying that the future is multispecies. When Dr Matsumori proposes that nature has decided, via morphic resonance, to exterminate men, human technology can still enable survival.
He thus merges human and nonhuman, science and nature. Dr Matsumori is ‘mother’ to Allison and Toyota through cloning. Allison tries to clone herself. When the novel ends, the original Yorick has been isolated and straitjacketed in Paris. A clone of his comes to meet him and is told that the original Yorick had tried to kill himself. In the course of the conversation between the two Yoricks, the original one is informed by his clone that the scientists ‘finally started engineering new strains’, who are not necessarily like the originals. To this pronouncement the original Yorick responds: ‘“New strains.” Like a disease’ (II: unpaginated). The irony is not lost on Yorick original or us: cloning, which supposedly created the plague, is now producing new ‘strains’ that will be different Yoricks but – and this is the endlessness of paranoid horror resurfacing in the text’s sublime repetition – may also bring back (different? same?) plagues.
The original Yorick’s comment, ‘like disease’, is at once a memory of how cloning may itself have caused the plague and a prophecy. The obliterative sublime’s final iteration of the cloning theme thus looks back at the past and at an uncertain, open-ended future. That the original Yorick escapes from his incarceration – and he has been throughout the work represented as an escape artist – implies a continuity. Thus, Desiree Khng is right to comment that ‘Yorick ends up in a déjà vu of an escape trick, enduring significant suffering through life only to finish where he had first started. The mirroring of past and present alludes to the ultimate meaninglessness to survival’ (2016: 175).
There is another ecological dimension in this entanglement of the obliterative sublime and governance of perishability. Yorick arrives in the (presumably African) bush and meets up with his sister Hero and her girlfriend, Beth. Hero tells him of her conservation efforts directed at the lionesses (II, unpaginated). Presumably this is about ensuring the continuity of the species. The cloning of Yorick is also, as we discover, directed at the continuation of the human race. Now Yorick, very early in the narrative has been told by many that his purpose in life is in ‘preventing the extinction of the human race’ (I, unpaginated). Early in the text we are shown Dr Mann furious with Yorick for smoking. The narrative, over time, demythifies this role for/of Yorick’s. First, it turns out that his own survival was due to the properties of the monkey Ampersand’s faeces. The full-page image shows a bemused or shocked Yorick and a larger-than-usual Ampersand imposed over him. It appears as though Ampersand – who in the previous panel was normal-sized – is taking a leap, his hands raised, and legs spread. Later, the hands raised and spread finds an odd verbal echo in the next page. When Dr Mann explains how the ‘pseudo-immunogobulin’ in the monkey’s faecal matter was the key factor, she uses the term ‘salvation’ to describe how the Y-chromosome was saved. Yorick explodes: ‘he’s a monkey, not Jesus Christ’ (I: unpaginated). Second, the governance and mitigation of future perishability lies in his genetic material,and is not therefore a simple act of impregnating numerous women. Third, it is the repetitive nature of tissue culture that, in the case of Yorick, enables a regeneration of the planet. This has already been demonstrated when we are told how Dr Matsumori cloned his daughter, then his daughter Allison seeks to clone herself, and so on, across laboratories in Japan, China and the USA. Tissue apparently is the solution to perishability (Bruyere 49).
Throughout Y, it is implied that Nature is instrumental, in some mysterious and unfathomable way, for both the destruction and the survival of select humans. But also implicit in this theme is the survivability of the social. In Y, the ‘Sons of Arizona’ group of women are determined that they ‘ain’t gonna go out like the 50,000 girls raped in Yugoslavia, or the 100,000 “comfort women” kidnapped by the Japs during…’ (I: unpaginated, ellipsis in original). As one of them explains in response to the question: ‘Didn’t you all lose fathers? Brothers? Friends’, ‘no. we lost rapists and dictators and … serial killers’ (I: unpaginated, ellipsis in original). And another Amazon adds, ‘mother earth eliminated you for a reason’ (I: unpaginated).
Vaughn here gestures at the destruction of a world order that was built by and upon patriarchy and gender injustice, as the Amazons and the Sons of Arizona enunciate it. But within this destruction as these groups also believe, lies the possibility of rebuilding the world. When the plot merges the natural (earth as the instrument of gendericide), and the human (science), it also speculates on a new world order through a similar blurring of these three dimensions. That said, Y emphasizes that any future community of survivors will require sciences to survive and propagate.
Conclusion
The monkey is central to both, the survival of the ‘last’ man (I place ‘last’ in quotes because we discover much later that two astronauts survive in outer space and so does Dr Matsumori) and his continuity in Y. Yorick cannot accept that his survival is owed to a primate. The future of human evolution, and not just its survival, is a strange (and uncanny) mix of species crossing and science, where the latter, somehow, also rides on species borrowing, adaptation and behaviour.
Y implies an unavoidable connection to the planet, whether in disaster or survival, as this analysis indicates. Japan, the USA, Australia are all equally in the grip of the mysterious condition that kills off all the men, just as the solution to the condition is also transnational in origin. Further, humans, as Yorick comes to discover, depend on another species for their cure and therefore for the very continuity of the human race – implying a cross-species connection. Finally, the novel, while dystopian, avoids representing technology as evil by suggesting that while technology has cost us, it can also enable the cure and the future.
About the author
Pramod K Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies. He is also Distinguished Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, The Environmental Graphic Novel, due from Routledge later in 2026.
References
Bruyere, Vincent. 2018. Perishability Fatigue: Forays into Environmental Loss and Decay. New York: Columbia University Press.
Goebel, Zane, and Howie Manns. 2020. “Chronotopic Relations: Chronotopes, Scale, and Scale-Making.” Language and Communication 70: 82–93.
Khng, Desiree L. 2016. “Philosophising Gender Politics in Y: The Last Man.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7 (2): 167–77.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Richards, Robert. 2000. “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (1): 11–32.
Rigby, Kate. 2015. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Robbins, Kimberly. 2010. “An Empirical Test of the Theory of Morphic Resonance by Using Recognition for Chinese Symbols.” Explore 6 (4): 256–62.
Vaughan, Brian K., and Pia Guerra. 2020. Y: The Last Man Compendium. 2 vols. DC Comics.
Vine, Steve. 2006. “Mary Shelley’s Sublime Bodies: Frankenstein, Matilda, The Last Man.” English 55: 141–56.
Williams, Cynthia Schoolar. 2006. “Mary Shelley’s Bestiary: The Last Man and the Discourse of Species.” Literature Compass 3 (2): 138–48.
