The White Plague. It was the other way 'round, and very sad...

Wylie wrote "The Disappearance" in 1951. At a moment in time, all human females vanish, leaving men behind. At the same moment, all human males vanish, leaving women behind. Wylie tracks both worlds, through the instant of disappearance, as unpiloted planes and buses crash, men and women making love realize they aren't, and through to the continuation of the cold war. The guys get it all wrong. The women get it right. At the end of a year or so, males and females are reunited. It was a good story for its time. I read it in college; don't know how well it would hold up 57 years later.

Brian K. Vaughn's tale of Yorick Brown is a masterpiece of storytelling. All I ever have to do is lend volume one to a friend and, within a few days, they'll be clamoring for the rest of the series. The characters are brilliantly complex and understated, and what might be an otherwise implausible series of scenarios are completely believable.

Sure, Herbert, Wylie, King and others have told similar tales; but why is that relevant? I mean, if we're talking about stories of the obsolescence of men, Aristophanes predates just about everyone on the list – and probably, he still wasn't the first.

What's more important than who did it first is who is doing it now.

As the world evolves and changes, it's important that new voices emerge to tell old stories, to put them into accessible contexts, and to help them recognize and appreciate works like The White Plague, The Disappearance, The Stand and even Lysistrata.

But without all the sharpness of wit that Voltaire's own satire does not thankfully lack.

So there's that...

If all men die then everyone left watches "Sex and the City." And everyone gets sad as everything ends. Or not.

Whatever.

If all women disappear then it's NFL football seven days a week until we die out. Whatever.

As soon as the compilation version is out, I'll buy it and read it.

I like what can be done with "graphic novels." From Hell is a tremendous work. So the The Watchmen. I confess, I bought the Preacher series even before the compilation, but I have a pretty sick sense of humor.

The joke about Hollywood vs. comics couldn't be more true. A storyboard IS a comic book. The filmmaker only has two "new tricks" over the graphic novelist--the action that occurs in a moving frame, and the audio/soundtrack gag.

On the side of some kinda (suspended of disbelief) scientific babble on the premise: women should be able to figure out how to propagate the species pretty easy without men. The opposite is not likely.

I always find it annoying when a female character who acts in a way we don't consider stereotypically feminine is referred to as a man in drag.

For the nearest you can get to this scenario in the real world, you might be interested in studying up on women's prisons where there's a lot women who take on roles we might consider male and act in ways your friend would doubtless insist women don't act.

My own opinion is that a world deprived of either sex would continue to be just as messed up as this one.

Years ago, the daily newspaper strip "Sylvia" asked the same question: What would the world be like if all the men disappeared.

Her answer: No crime and lots of fat, happy women.

Works for me.

"Lots of fat stupid women."

I often wish women would just take over and run things so I can retire to some northern wood and spend the rest of my days in the unbroken meditation of bachelorhood building guitars and canoes. I'm really tired of always having to be in charge and making all the decisions. And just for once I want to be able to say "Yes, honey. Those pants do make your ass look fat."

Thanks for reminding me about this wonderful series. I need to read it again.

Vaughan and Guerra's murderous female supremacist Victoria, for instance, is totally unconvincing as a woman character -- because she's a perfectly convincing male supremacist in drag.

Douglas Wolk unintentionally references Sartre's (as I recall) complaint about the essentialization gender differences. "We have created two categories of people," he said (or nearly so), "women and human beings, but when a woman asks to be treated as a human being she is accused of acting like a man."

In this case, of course, part of the definition of "human being" includes "capable of evil." Why should such a character automatically be seen as a man in drag?

An apt and excellant question that deserves introspection.

I suppose the best thing to say is that "Y: The Last Man" is not really about what women would actually do if there were no men. It really is about a society that does have both men and women, and it makes fun of so-called patriarchal values by placing them in situations where they don't have any support -- no men to live by them. As the author of the essay says, it's really about us, now, not about a manless society.

What really would happen if men disappeared? I'm sure the world would become different in many ways, but I don't think it would be closer to utopia. Evil would go on existing, suffering wouldn't disappear, etc. As in all cases of attempting to 'plan' a utopia, so many things in man's (or in this case woman's) psyche would have been left out that the result would simply be just as messy as it currently is, though the ingredients might change.

Amity: you ask a very important question, and one that I would like to see discussed by feminists. The usual take on this is that "human being" is masculinized: we expect default humans to be men, so default humans have typically masculine features. Now, as your mention of (maybe) Sartre suggests, it may also be the other way round: most (stereo)typical features of human beings (e.g. capacity for evil) have been assumed to be male because the default human being was male.