A confession.

Another small pull list today (Wednesday Comics and Exiles #5, a title I continue to enjoy and will sadly miss after next month), and NEC finally had the first volume of Y: The Last Man in (no back issues of Secret Six, so I'm waiting for September's TP), so I picked up the first two (this is my logic). Yes yes, I've never read Y, I know. I know!

That was the confession, for those not paying attention.

But I'm reading it now. I'm about halfway through Volume 1, Unmanned, so... three issues, I think.

Yeah, I love it. The storytelling is snappy, the content is mature, a woman co-wrote it (and draws some mighty nice art), and the story itself is interesting.

When I was in college I took a class called... actually, I don't remember. But it was about Utopian and Dystopian fiction, and it was taught by a professor that had formerly been part of the Women's Studies department, but had left in a flurry of political intrigue and gone to the Comparative Literature department. Not that I knew that at the time. I was just into post-apocalyptic science fiction, and needed a Gen Ed, so I took it. We read some interesting stuff, some boring stuff, and some good stuff.

And we read this book called Egalia's Daughters. The premise was that this world existed where females were dominant and males were oppressed. But, like, just completely opposite. Like that one episode of Ellen where the majority was gay and the minority was straight. Complete opposite things don't really work for me, because, well. Reality. I think the intent was to say that women would be just as bad in power as men are, which makes sense in the context of that professor (like I said, she'd left the Women's Studies department, and I'd found out it was because she'd become a vocal "anti-feminist") but which fell really flat in the context of the story. I don't know, maybe it was the translation, or maybe it was the fact that the most memorable scene in the book was one where the male protagonist was gang raped by some women... who rubbed themselves against his thigh.

Not that that's not a violation, but I don't even recall there being any penetration. And this led to a quasi-interesting discussion about the nature of rape, which I had in a way more interesting context in my 1L criminal law class a few years later, but it just really took away from the book. The scene was almost comical. Also there were a lot of really ignorant things said during that discussion that got us off on tangents.*

Speaking of tangents, my point was that Y reminds me of that book, but in a good way. Like, this was what we should have read in class. It doesn't show women as the exact same as men, but it shows them acting similarly in difficult situations (okay okay, I'm only three issues in, so we'll see), thereby showing actual equality. It's not ridiculous, it's very realistic and that makes it much easier to connect to and much creepier. I love me some well-done post-apocalyptic fiction.

I'll probably write the occasional reactionary post as I read through the ten volumes. Last year Pia Guerra was supposed to go the Gallifrey One convention, but lost her passport (or something). I hope she goes this year. By February I'll have finished the books and would really be interested in talking to her.

Anyway. I'm finally reading Y. There we go, confessed and absolved.



*To be fair, I tried re-reading the book about a year ago. It was even worse than I'd remembered, and I failed to see the point to it at all. The males weren't "men that are oppressed," they were written like caricatures women in our culture, but with penises. And the same for the women: caricatures of men, but with vaginas. Satire!fail.