Beloved Comic Y: The Last Man Is Coming to Television

The series follows the last surviving man on an Earth full of woman — and it’s not as great as it sounds. 

One of the most innovative stories in comic book history is coming to your television.

Y: The Last Man, the beloved dystopian sci-fi series that follows the last man on Earth after a cataclysm wipes out everything with a Y chromosome, will becoming an ongoing series on FX, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Creator Brian K. Vaughn will reportedly join forces with studio Color Force to development the series. No director or actors are attached at this time.


In media landscape dominated by zombie outbreaks (The Walking Dead) and nuclear holocausts (everything Terminator), Y:The Last Man‘s 2002 debut marked an innovative and critically-acclaimed re-imagining of the post-apocalyptic science fiction drama. The series centers on Yorick Brown, an unemployed escape artist, and Capuchin monkey Ampersand after a mysterious plague kills off every animal on the planet (including humans) that possess a Y chromosome. As the world falls into chaos, Yorick and Ampersand set out in search of Yorick’s missing girlfriend, stranded in Australia when things start to fall apart. It sounds like a dream — who wouldn’t want to be the last guy alive on a planet full of women? — but things turn ugly fast.


The news of a potential TV series is huge news for fans of the original comic book series, which ran for 60 issues. New Line Cinema has initially planned on creating a feature film based on the books before delays caused the rights to revert back to Vaughn. 


“New Line — a corporate sibling to publisher Vertigo — acquired the film rights to the series in 2007 and set David Goyer, Carl Ellsworth and director D.J. Caruso to adapt,” The Hollywood Reporter notes. “The latter wound up walking away from the project after New Line didn’t want to produce the saga as a three-film franchise but rather a two-hour stand-alone feature.”


If things between FX and Vaugn don’t fall apart, it looks likeY fans will get a chance to watch Yorick and Ampersand  trek across a tattered world in the flesh. Considering that we’re living in the golden age of creative prestige TV, the time has never been better for a brand new take on the apocalypse.

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