When Brian K. Vaughan’s science fiction comic epic Y: The Last Man began several years ago, Christine was right on it, praising its “mature and complex look at gender politics.”

Brought to life by Pia Guerra’s stunning artwork, Vaughan’s vision reveals the great potential of both the science fiction and comic genres. As Vaughan says, “Good sci-fi is always about our world rather than some far-flung future.” And he has created a subtle but very relevant political statement.

Well, it’s nice to know that such a vision can find a wider audience. Check out Douglas Wolk’s glowing review in Salon of the concluding volume of the series — just released in June — calling it the end of the “wittiest, most entertaining story about gender in recent memory”:

Vaughan gets a lot of mileage out of speculating about what would happen if all men really did vanish from the Earth: Vatican City, for instance, would become a mausoleum, and so would the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange, but the Israeli military would be just fine. Long-distance commerce would be a disaster for years, thanks to the highways being blocked by enormous pileups caused by half of all drivers abruptly keeling over. Australia, as one of the few countries that allowed women to serve on submarines, would rule the waves. Supermodels would be forced into new lines of work, like driving a garbage truck full of men’s corpses. (America’s next top undertaker!)

But “Y” isn’t an argument about what really would happen if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea, or even a bildungsroman, as much as it is a wickedly clever satire of patriarchal culture. It’s a story about men and the chaos and ruination they’ve brought to the world, in which all the “male” roles are played by female characters. There are ferociously funny little riffs on women getting by on their looks, “man-to-man” conversations, “women and children first,” men as protectors and women as protected, women as sexual temptresses of men, men asking women to smile, “proving one’s manhood,” and practically every other kind of awful gender essentialism.

Vaughan has gone on to write for ABC’s “Lost” and even for the “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” comic series — and there’s a “Y” movie in development. So expect to continue seeing the world through his unique lens.