The Spirit of the Stairwell

I’ve always loved comics. For me they combine the strongest elements of cinema and literature into a brilliant hybrid-medium. The very best comics can have all the immediacy and scale of a film. The visual storytelling and pacing that cinema enjoys can be reproduced shot for shot  – splash pages, close ups, juxtapositions of words and images – while still retaining the emotional complexity and depth that are the hallmarks of great literature. We get to explore characters’ inner lives, the serialised nature of many comics allowing for an epic tale that leaves no character beat or situation unexplored.

So the only real problem is that there aren’t that many great comics. Alan Moore, one of the titans of the industry, once explained that any emerging medium is seen first and foremost as something for the kids. When cinema began, everything was a western, even today you could stick a ten gallon hat on all the male protagonists of many films and create a credible western. Reservoir Dogs – Western, The Italian Job – multi-coloured horses riding across the rooftops of Turin, The Matrix – lots of leather and hails of bullets, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood etc etc. Comics then, have found it even more difficult to break free from their defining genre, everything is about super heroes. In cinema terms it would be like 95% of all films were still Westerns – from Rom-Coms to pornos. What a waste of an art form.

Except things are changing. The best comic series ever written is, of course, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman but hot on it’s heels is a series I’ve only just finished today. It’s called Y: The Last Man and I think it’s about the funniest, most literate, heartbreaking work of genius I’ve had the pleasure to experience in a long time. And not a pair of tights or cape in sight. Everything about this book is just about perfect, the structure, the characters – it’s as light of touch and pacey as Speilberg at the top of his game and as complex and self-referential, unpredictable and earthy as anything by authors like Douglas Coupland and Ian Banks.

And it’s funny. Did I mention how funny it is?

What’s it about? Well I don’t want to spoil the surprises but essentially every mammal with a Y chromosome dies simultaneously in a global gendercide except for one failed escapologist and his monkey. But that’s just the jumping off point …

Please, please – whatever your view of comics, the three colour funnies and the earnest politicising of grown up ‘graphic novels’, you owe it to yourself to at least read the first book. 

You won’t regret it.

At least until it ends, then you feel kind of empty inside and need to write a long blog post about it.