Inspiration for the Last Man on Earth

Earlier in the week I posted a couple of panels from Y: The Last Man, an adventure (but not superhero) comic series from Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra.

The premise of Y: The Last Man is that a global plague has killed all the men on Earth save one: a slacker escape artist named Yorick. When I described this to my mother, she said that only men would come up with this scenario. And indeed, when Bill Haley and the Comets sang of the same premise in the song "Thirteen Women," it was clearly male fantasy.

But in the comic, Yorick doesn't enjoy the new world much. Not only does he want to remain true to his girlfriend, who was on the other side of the world when the plague struck, but the female survivors are divided on what to do with him. Not a small number want to turn him into a sex slave, kill him, or dissect him for his Y chromosome.

But Yorick, with the help of a female government agent, a female scientist, his pet monkey, and other helpful folks, keeps chugging along. What in his childhood prepared him for such perseverance? What could inspire him to keep going? One clue might appear in this flashback panel of little Yorick with his big sister, Hero.
And a close-up.
I'm just saying.

Interrupting Word Balloons

The panels above come from the first page of the first issue of Y: The Last Man, scripted by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Pia Guerra, and--most important for today's observation--lettered by Clem Robins.

I was struck by how the speech balloons overlap greatly to show the characters interrupting each other. One balloon doesn't just encroach on another's border, which is common, but actually obscures some words inside, which isn't--at least in mainstream American comics.

I'd been thinking about how to use word-balloon graphics to indicate background speech when I read this story, so it was nifty to see such a technique in use.

But then it disappeared from the book. I don't know if editors didn't like it, or readers didn't get it, or the creators decided it was a failed experiment.

In this online discussion about lettering technique, Robins explained how he changes his usual method of working with a digital file as he creates overlapping balloons:

my normal layers are

text
balloons
spare clipping mask
info
page numbers
artwork
croplines

but for overlapping dialogue, i add six layers to this, and it becomes

text (top)
balloons (top)
text (middle)
balloons (middle)
text (bottom)
balloons (bottom)
spare clipping mask
info
page numbers
artwork
croplines

So that might explain why Vaughan and Robins moved away from the technique. It could have been too much extra work.