Alas, Poor Yorick
ONE OF THE MOST lauded non-superhero comic books of the early 2000s was Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Vertigo series Y: The Last Man. In it, the world experiences a sudden event where every mammal which has a Y chromosome just dies, except for an unassuming, underachieving 20-something, Yorick Brown, and his pet capuchin monkey called Ampersand.
Equal parts thriller, gender exploration, romance and political potboiler, seemed like a cert for adaptation to film or TV. But series to finally come into being. After several development iterations and creative changes, it was playwright Eliza Clark’s take on the book that ultimately won out, starring Ben Schnetzer as Yorick, and Diane Lane playing his mother, the de facto President of the United States.
