Words: Brian K. Vaughan
Art: Pia Guerra
Publisher: Vertigo
This issue was published more than ten years ago (2002). Yet, what has it lost? Not a damn thing. Not the exceptional artwork or the insanely good writing. It’s as fresh and exciting today as it was when it was initially released.
I find, rereading the series after all this time, that a central question remains, one that carries all of the characters, reader included, to a frustrating non-answer: Namely, is this a book of forgetting, or a book of remembering? I tend to lean toward the latter, as the former seems too simple, too overt, too typical. No, this is a story of humanity–or should I qualify that by saying, roughly half of humanity, and its ability to carry on, to fight through overwhelming odds and painful, bitter disappointment.
And I believe Yorick, the story’s main character, is just the court jester, exactly the mad clown, to take what’s left of the deeply scarred world by the hand and gently remind it both of the natural wonderment of eyes-wide-open optimism and of the bold fierceness of human conviction. Yorick seeks not to remind those closest to him and those he meets after the masculine cataclysm of things past–far from it; rather, he seeks to remind them that, although life has ended for 50% of the population, life has nevertheless continued for the other half.
Yorick is a clown, to be sure, and he plays his role well. But he is not guilty of allowing the world to hold him in its hand and remember the way things used to be. Yorick, for all his shortcomings, is a man of the fates, not unlike Odysseus, favored by some god to be alive, ill-favored of another to be lost at sea, desperately seeking the shoreline. He is a physical reminder that, though the twists and turns may be many and far-reaching, the plaything of the gods yet lives, and that he has not yielded to the fates.
The ultimate lesson of issue #1, then, is not one of loss of memory, or even of the loss of something tangible. The real rhetorical culprit is that of harsh reality viewed through the lens of hormonal success. Where one chromosome ceases to be, another ceases to be self-aware, and begins to seize hold of the future.
NB: This review touches a bit on events that take place in subsequent issues. Each issue reviewed going forward will be self contained.
