Y: The Last Man

At first I thought it was a bit odd that Y: The Last Man was part of the superhero readings. Yorrick isn't super in anyway except that he is the only human man to survive a mysterious 'plague' that wiped out every animal on earth with a Y chromosome. His only power is being alive. But I realized throughout reading it that just because Yorrick is the title character that doesn't necessarily make him the superhero. I'd say the women who survive and rebuild after half the world's population are the superheroes. 355 is definitely a superhero and protector with Yorrick practically a damsel in distress. The only thing Yorrick technically really does to help in this is be alive, and most of the time that is just because all the women around him are trying so damn hard to keep him that way. This comic even has the 'super villain' character in a non-traditional sense, in fact multiple of them. The Amazons, the Setauket Ring, Alter, and Dr. Mann's father are typical 'super villains' in this story which I think really solidifies it's categorization as a superhero comic.

Not surprisingly this comic has extremely well rounded and human female characters. Particularly their reactions to the extinction of the men is very believable. Huge public mournings, super models turned garbage truck drivers, and mechanics who shaved their heads make this so believable. It would be so easy to make every woman drool when they see Yorrick and for every woman to just be in shambles, but they aren't. They are surviving and they are fixing the world. They are being superheroes. Some are driven insane, but that is totally believable too, because we can't all be the hero. It is very admirable that such an unbiased version of this world was written by a man. The one thing that really allowed these characters to shine and truly just been seen as human instead of just their gender is that there are no men. There is no way to make an excuse that a woman wouldn't normally have that job, or she wouldn't act that way or dress that way because it wouldn't be decent and because of that all the characters are allowed to be shown just exactly as they are with no constraints. Seeing women just in the context of being and as humans rather than as counterparts to men is so incredibly rare and this is definitely the purest representation of women I've ever read because of that.