Right, here’s the blurb. From next week, I’m going to be alternating Infected and a new column called Fantasy Bazaar every second week. Next Wed, I’ll post Fantasy Bazaar No.2, the following Wed Infected and so on…

Fantasy Bazaar* is going to be a fort-nightly comics column, focusing on Graphic Novels. Every fortnight, we’ll be reviewing a favourite Graphic Novel or Comic Book Series of ours from the past or present, hopefully converting a few people to the medium of the Graphic Novel in the process.

Fantasy Bazaar No.1

Y: The Last Man

There are so many post-apocalyptic novels, comics, movies and games these days, that it’s hard to even begin to distinguish one from another at times. With natural disasters and Zombies being the most common theme throughout the majority of this work, it’s very refreshing when a comic like Y: The Last Man (Y:TLM) comes along. It beganin 2002 and ran through to last year, having 10 volumes published.

Written by Lost’s writer, Brian K. Vaughan and beautifully illustrated by Canadian, Pia Guerra, Y:TLM presents a world where a mysterious virus has wiped out anything with a Y chromosome. Women rule supreme.

Yorrick and Ampersand

But wait. There are two male exceptions. One is Yorrick Brown, a cheeky amateur escape artist. The other? His pet capuchin monkey, Ampersand.

The story is flawlessly constructed by Vaughan, and fuses humour with tradgedy to great effect. The scenario posed is a serious one. Women are faced with the task of ruling a world without men, in the knowledge that humanity is heading for extinction. And poor old Yorrick is stuck in the middle of all of these women, most of whom have ulterior motives in regard to their relationships with him.

Vaughan finds the horror in what would have been most guys fantasies: To be the last man on Earth. On the basis of these books, I think I like things just the way they are.

I have found the 10 book series to be impossible to put down, and would rate it alongside the long-standing ‘The Walking Dead’ series and ’100 Bullets’ as being my favourite Graphic Novel series. What I like most about it is Pia Guerra’s fantastic art-work. It harps back to an older style of lo-fi art, and ignores the glossy and ‘so realistic it’s un-realistic’ stuff of recent times. It manages to be look nostalgic, sparse and horrifc at times while maintaining the stark realism that it’s writer had aimed for.

If you like serial TV ala Lost, Jericho or Carnivale or Movies such as Children of Men and Escape From New York then this one’s for you.

Interestingly, this one is set to be adadpted into a triology, produced by The Dark Knight’s David S.Goyer. Young Shia LaBeouf is rumoured to play Yorrick, which after you’ve read the book, you will be pretty disgusted with. But nothing is confirmed just yet.

*Where did we get the name from? Well from Bilbo Bagshot’s comic book store in Spaced (Simon Pegg’s show) of course