2. Y: The Last Man
I promise that this is the last mention of Brian K. Vaughan in this list! The premise for this comic is a simple one; on July 2002, somehow every living male species on the planet dies apart from one man, Yorick, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. That is all you need to know and hopefully this is all that you will need to get you interested in this comic. The story then follows Yorick and Ampersand as they travel across America in a world only populated by women trying to track down the cause of this problem. Some may think this a boring concept, but the world that Vaughan creates shows how divided we still are as a society when it comes to gender roles and manages to create a wholly believable scenario out of something that seems completely unbelievable. Women who have fought for so long to be seen as equal to men, now find themselves fighting against one another to gain the power that their spouses possessed and used. The comic is a complex mix of post-apocalyptic survival story, romance, gender studies, and thriller that does not focus to specifically on one so that the others fall at the wayside. As I write this a script for a film version is apparently nearing completion, but a story this big an expansive is something is shouldn't be confined to the big screen. Audiences need time to connect with these characters and follow them as them as the story progresses and develop their own thoughts and opinions on what actually caused the wipe out of the male species on the planet.