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Why: The Last Man?

Literature // Jim // 18th June 2009

Famously, the justly celebrated author Alan Moore won’t have anything to do with the cinematic adaptations of his work. Anyone who has sat through the execrable League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is likely to completely sympathise.

However it isn’t just the shoddy nature of the film versions, or the horror of dealing with nasty Hollywood types that puts him off. All those who were excited at the prospect of the Watchmen film earlier this year (I admit, myself included) were missing the bigger point. A point expressed by the man himself in a quote regarding the adaptation that I have carefully prized out of the arse of the internet:

"I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't."

"My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee."

It wasn’t until I’d watched Zac Snyder’s version of Watchmen that I really understood why Moore had such a downer on the whole enterprise. Despite being a complete love letter to the comic and following the plot, visual style and dialogue almost to the last letter/pen stroke, the film just doesn’t really work.

Some may say that this is down to weaknesses in the film – changing the ending to remove the psychic shockwave creating big squid with a vagina-esque eye, throwing in that shockingly awful fuck scene with Leonard Cohen groaning in the background, or the addition of the completely redundant extra violent bits.

However I reckon Mr Moore is completely right - as you would expect from a man who has the good sense to worship a snake deity freely accepted to be a hoax perpetrated through the use of a glove puppet. Watchmen works beautifully as a comic but no matter how faithfully you attempt to adapt it to another form it just can’t maintain all the characteristics that make it so great when it traverses the boundary from one media to another.

Imagine trying to turn a Jackson Pollock into a song, wouldn’t work would it? Well, probably not.

So with that in mind the I find the current internet controversy over the news that Y: The Last Man is almost entirely misguided.

For the uninitiated, Y: TLM is the epic tale of Yorick Brown, a twenty-something escape artist who ends up being the last male on earth after some mysterious event causes everything else on the planet with a pair of balls to instantly and bloodily perish.

The scope of the story is that of several intersecting quests, taking place across a chaotic girls-only planet, where as you can imagine everything has literally gone tits up. Yorick wants to find his girlfriend, a shady ladies-only government agency want to protect him, the Israeli Defence Force are determined to get hold of him for some reason, plus there are all sorts of mad scientists, tabloid journos and deadly ninjas involved here and there.

Y: The Last Man: Speculative, genius

Y: TLM wraps up all sorts of what if speculation on a solely female society inside a really compelling story, replete with plenty of swearing, violence and sexy lady action – so something for everyone. It is also chock-full of excellent cultural references, brilliant jokes and proper fleshed out characters who don’t easily conform to any sort of good/bad templates.

As you may well imagine all sorts of praise has been forthcoming, the cover of each volume has some critic or other wanking themselves silly with quotes like “A Comic Book Masterpiece”, “This is why God created comic books” and “I was blind but now I can see”.
The inevitable upshot being that a film adaptation is now underway, helmed by DJ Caruso and initially rumoured to be starring (or maybe not) Shia Labeouf as Yorick.

Now I can understand why this has got people upset, I sat through Eagle Eye, yes it was a load of absolute dog toss. I also realise that Mr Labeouf isn’t perhaps the most gifted or charismatic actor in the world. But this all misses the point, we could bring Stanley Kubrick back to life using voodoo techniques to direct and create some sort of composite clone of De-Niro and Depp at age twenty to star, but making a film of Y: The Last Man would still be a terrible idea.

The books contain a wealth of devices; back-story flashbacks, searing violence, political satire, trippy-dream action, corny one-liners that may all seem quite cinematic, but I fear will translate to the screen about as well as Super Mario Brothers did.

A likely prospect is that the film makers realise that they are onto a loser early doors and proceed to strip out all of the content that makes Y: The Last Man such a triumph and reduce it to a high concept action flick with loads of busty lesbian sex and violence. Which would be a terrible, terrible thing. Clearly.

Links that would love to be trapped in-all girl world.

Comic homepage

On the DC comics web site.

Download the firts issue here.

Its a free pdf so you can see what the fuss is about.