Games Review

I swear, I have not started playing for the other team. I still dig chicks. But I also loved Pitch Perfect, a movie where a bunch of nerds enter competitions where they sing and don't have any backup music. Again, I am not gay.

 The thing is, Pitch Perfect was freaking hilarious. From the disturbing little Japanese girl who whispers that she starts fires to feel joy to Fat Amy doing horizontal running, the movie is jam-packed with laughs. Every character in the movie has a funny line at some point. The one guy from Workaholics is in there, and he's funny as hell, too. The whole movie is just damned funny.

But there are plenty of comedies out there. You could watch one of those ridiculous Wayans brothers send-ups, if you just want a comedy (and if you can find absolutely nothing else to watch). Pitch Perfect doesn't just make you laugh. It makes you smile.

There are essentially two or three stories running alongside each other. You've got the classic romance - will the guy get the girl? You've got the team battle - can the all-girl singing squad win the national competition? And will the main character, a stand-offish hottie who pushes people away from her, be able to overcome her general mistrust of everybody and make some lasting friends? OK, there's really nothing earth-shaking here, but that's fine. Pitch Perfect is a likeable movie, a fun movie, a smiling movie. It's not a brain-stressing indie film, and you'll smile at the outcome to all these stories, as you watch the lead girl discover herself in the great big world.

I don't think I'm actually selling this very well. Usually, a sing-off in a date movie is the exact opposite of a compelling reason to watch a movie. In fact, until my wife chose this one because it was her birthday, there was no possible way I was going to consider watching Pitch Perfect. Which is why I'm going to have to ask you to trust me. Pitch Perfect is so good, I watched it twice.

I've saved the best part for last - the musical numbers. Let me reiterate that I am not the least bit romantically interested in men. Furthermore, I hate musicals. Why anyone thinks it ever makes sense for a regular conversation to suddenly break into song is beyond me. I heartily dislike Andrew Lloyd Weber, and I have very little patience for most Disney movies. I would rather clip my toenails than watch Glee. Yet I couldn't wait for the singing to start in Pitch Perfect.

This is not a musical. The characters do not start singing unless they have a good reason. Nobody is just walking along, minding their own business, and then they start serenading the birds. The songs happen when they should, and they're amazing (except the ones that are supposed to be boring, and that's OK because they are occasionally punctuated by spontaneous projectile regurgitation). They're incredibly fun because they're original and fresh and upbeat. When the lead character breaks into her solo at the end of the movie, my smile got so big I was afraid my face would get stuck that way and completely ruin my reputation as a grumpy old man.

A funny thing happened to me since I saw Pitch Perfect. I mentioned it to a friend at work - who absolutely loved it, and I was surprised. Then I mentioned it to my best friend, who is a cop and a bad-ass, and he had seen it, and HE loved it. I'm not just blowing smoke up your skirt as a joke - Pitch Perfect really is an exceptionally fun movie, one that will make you laugh and smile and maybe dance a little. I swear.

As lots of people know, I had a house fire a year ago that destroyed every game I owned. It also almost killed my son. Since that time, I've replaced a pretty good number of those games, though happily, I didn't have to replace my son. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to buy a new teenager? Probably not that expensive, actually. Most parents would probably pay me to take their teenage children off their hands.

A few people have asked me what games I replaced, and I thought it would make a handy article, and give me something to write about so I don't have to plow through eight episodes of Band of Brothers just to have a blog post.

1. Warhammer Quest.

Yep, it's still my favorite. The insurance gave me $500 to replace it, and I spent the whole thing. I got the base game in great shape, and it was even unpainted (bonus for me, since I prefer to paint my own minis). The merciful soul who sold the game to me also had a huge mess of extra minis and all the White Dwarf mags that had Warhammer Quest articles, and I got four of the expansion heroes, to boot. I was happy.

2. Heroscape.

My good friend had some extra Scape, and since that's pretty darn close to my favorite of all time, he let me buy it from him cheaper than he should have.

3. Frontiers, Nostra City and Wicked Witches Way.

I lump these all together because they were wicked cheap on Tanga and I got them all at the same time. I love all three of these games, especially Nostra City. When you have a game where you can rat your opponents out to the FBI while you peddle heroin and run whores, it's a winner in my book.

4. That's it.

See, the insurance gave me money for the games, but the repairs on the house went over by almost 20 grand. I wasn't able to buy replacements, because I had to fix my house. So those games are the only ones I was able to buy again. However...

5. Sentinels of the Multiverse.

When the guys at Greater Than Games found out about the fire, they sent me out a copy of the enhanced edition of Sentinels. Holy crapcakes, that's a fun game, and I've been playing the hell out of it. Mad thanks to the Greater Than guys, and also...

6. Super Dungeon Explore.

Same deal with the Cool Mini Or Not marketing dude - he replaced my copy of Super Dungeon Explore, because not only is he awesome, but I can't very well review expansions if I don't have the game.

7. 7 Wonders.

I actually do freelance work for the head marketing guy at Asmodee, and so on top of a bunch of other stuff, he hooked me up with a replacement for 7 Wonders after I helped out at BGG Con.

8. Russian Board Games That Are Actually Card Games.

The Russian guys who make the excellent Potion Making Practice sent me all the games that were lost in the fire, and threw in the expansions. I love those guys.

9. Nightfall.

The guy at AEG is a prince. I ran into him at BGG Con and he said to tell me all the games that I didn't have any more so that he could send me replacements. To be honest, I still haven't taken him up on the offer, because I feel obligated to plow through my current crop of review copies before I go asking for more. But the point is, he's a prince, and I can get Nightfall again when I finally have room in my review schedule.

9. Risk Legacy, Earth Reborn and Race for the Galaxy.

These were gifts from my old man. He's pretty awesome. Seriously. I can't emphasize enough how cool my dad is.

10. Rush N Crush.

My friend John saw a copy of Rush N Crush on sale at GenCon, and when he saw it, he remembered me talking about how much I like it. So he just up and bought it for me. He wouldn't let me pay him back, either.

11. Risk Black Ops.

The best one of all of these is this one right here. This is a bigger collector's item than Warhammer Quest, and I was certain I was never going to see it again. But my friend who worked at Hasbro finagled me a copy, and so I will bear his children,if he asks.

That's it. I would love to show you a long list of stuff, but for one thing, I wouldn't replace a long list of games, and for another thing, the money ran out. There weren't a whole lot of other games I would have bought anyway, and I actually got replacements for more than I thought I would. I'm lucky as hell to have some great friends, and a great dad, and I know some great people in the gaming world. While I would not recommend burning your house down just to find out how lucky you are, I'm not altogether sad it happened. Sure, it put an end to VixenTor Games by destroying all my tools and inventory, but it gave me something more valuable - it let me see how many incredible people I know.

And now I owe all these guys beers. My bar tab is going to murder me.

Yeah, you read the title right. The name of the game is Chicken Caesar. It's a political game. About chickens.

I can only imagine how the idea came to the designer. He and his girl are sitting in a restaurant ordering dinner. Being a man, he is ordering steak, maybe beer, possibly with a huge baked potato. His girl, on the other hand, asks for a salad. 'Chicken Caesar,' she tell the waiter, and the dude has this momentary flash of what he thinks at the time is brilliance. He thinks about it all night, is too distracted to pay attention to his woman, and then ends up sitting up all night making a game about roosters in the Roman senate.

It should go without saying that the theme is a little silly. Various families of chickens scratch and claw to claim the best seats in the senate and establish family legacies. Foxes eat many of these chickens, and when one of them does manage to become Caesar, that poor bastard winds up in the farmer's cook pot. Oh, and they wear togas.

But what is not immediately obvious is that the game is actually very good. This is especially tough to spot when you read the rules, because while they definitely describe how to play, they do a horrible job of telling you what you're actually doing. When you get all the way through the rules, you'll have to go back and read them again to try to understand what the hell you're trying to accomplish.

But once you start playing, and you're all competing for the best gigs in the senate, and you're bribing other players and promising favors and stabbing each other in the back, the goal becomes pretty obvious - reach the top of the food chain in whatever ugly manner makes that possible. And 'food chain' is meant politically, because the top of the real food chain in this game is the fox that makes off with members of the senate almost every turn. There's a significant body count in Chicken Caesar, and every turn you'll be maneuvering and negotiating to keep yourself alive long enough to rule, even if it's just for one turn.

Chicken Caesar is a delightfully social game, one in which the tactics are less important than your ability to coax your opponents into screwing somebody else. You'll maneuver yourself into a position to help out a fellow rooster, then extract a bribe to save his bacon. You'll offer to trade votes - you vote for me, I vote for you - and then you may or may not actually follow through. And even if you do follow through, if you're good, you'll profit a lot more than the guy you help.

And then, if you've got roosters in the right place, you'll kill the bejeezus out of all the others. This part is hilarious fun, because you have to share the chicken-killing power with up to two other people, and they'll have a pretty good idea if you're trying to kill their elected roosters. So you have to play a little nice, throw blame to other players, and ultimately send as many scheming chickens as possible to the belly of the fox.

If you prefer tactical games where you maneuver your troops into position and set up firing solutions, you are not going to love Chicken Caesar. If you like to maximize the efficiency of your gaming engine, this is not the game you want. But if you like to cajole and threaten and promise and betray, then you are definitely going to want to get your hands on this game. It's political fun, better with more players, and the art is fantastic, even if it does feature chickens in Roman robes.

Summary

3-6 players

Pros:
Great visual design
Tons of social interaction
Excellent body count
Rewards scheming and plotting

Cons:
Not great if you dislike being mean to other players
Thematically silly

You can only get Chicken Caesar from Game Salute, unless you can find it in stores. You can order it here:
AVE ROOSTER

I don't generally have much interest in foreign film, whether it's French arthouse navel-gazing or dubbed Japanese classics. But every now and then, a foreign movie challenges what we expect out of cinema, elevating the art form and raising the bar for filmmaking in general.

Dead Snow is not one of those movies.

Dead Snow is stupid. It should be pretty obvious once I explain the premise - a bunch of med students going to a cabin in the mountains encounter frozen Nazi zombies - but this is a film designed for people who giggle out loud when they see brains fall out of heads. Nazi zombies, as it turns out, are fast and mean and much more dangerous than regular zombies. Mostly because they don't follow any rules, not even the rules set out by the movie itself.

Just so you can get a feel for how stupid this movie really is, here are a few highlights:

- The creepy old man comes to the cabin and tells the kids to be careful, because Nazi zombies are out there. Then he leaves, goes to a deserted part of the mountain, and sets up a tent for the night. Predictably, he is killed by Nazi zombies. Probably because, despite just having told the med students that Nazi zombies made it dangerous to go out at night, he decided to go out at night.

- The creepy old man tells the kids (before he is killed by Nazi zombies) that there were about 300 soldiers, and most of them were killed, but some escaped just to be lost in the snow and turned into Nazi zombies.  So there should be a relatively small number of Nazi zombies, right? No. Apparently they are having Nazi zombie orgies to create more Nazi zombies, because later in the movie, hundreds of Nazi zombies start popping out of the snow like they were shot out of a toaster.

- Sometimes the Nazi zombies are very strong, like when one of them grabs a kid's head, puts its thumbs in the poor boy's eye sockets, and rips the kid's skull in half. That would take some pretty impressive upper-body strength. But other times they are candy-ass Nazi zombies, like when one punches a college kid in the face and barely hurts him at all. Strong enough to pull a skull apart and weak enough to hit like a girl. No wonder they lost whatever battle left them moldering in the snowy mountains of Sweden - they just can't decide whether to be killing machines or ski bunnies.

- The Nazi zombies are killing people from the opening scenes of the film, but at the end, we discover they were just angry because the kids had their gold. Except that the kids did not have their gold when the Nazis started killing them.  Apparently Nazi zombies do not need many excuses to rip heads off college kids.

There are more inconsistencies, plot holes and idiotic moments, but if I tell you about all of them you won't have any reason to see the movie (outside watching a guy rappelling down a mountain using Nazi zombie intestines for rope). If you have a lick of sense, you also don't have a reason to see Dead Snow, but it just might be that you like campy horror movies with ludicrous bloodshed.

If you do enjoy a brainless comedy-horror flick, however, Dead Snow should be on your watchlist. It is intensely idiotic, but it doesn't take itself the least bit seriously, and it contains some rather clever moments. Some of the lines are hilarious, even when you're hearing them in Swedish and reading the translation at the bottom of the screen.

Dead Snow is also a very self-aware movie. The writers know what they are creating, and they want you to know that they know. It follows horror-movie tropes with near-religious fanaticism, acknowledging its roots in dopey slasher flicks. It even has a moment, near the beginning of the film, when the characters are discussing how many stupid horror movies start off with a bunch of kids going up to a remote cabin before they all get horribly murdered. And I love when the one college student, covered in gore and slaying Nazi zombies as fast as he can, screams, 'We should have just gone to the beach like I said!'

I first heard about Dead Snow in a promotional video created by a Swedish pop singer. It was a music video with a perky little blonde who sang a charming tune called, 'My Ass,' in which she extolled the virtues of her shapely backside. Halfway through this nearly pornographic little ditty, the singer pauses while girls carrying large cards reading 'Dead Snow' walk in front of the camera. The song has absolutely nothing to do with Dead Snow, and the promotion was so immensely out of place that I had a very good idea exactly what kind of movie it was. And I was pretty sure it was going to be inane. And I was right.

But it is fun, and the writers know they are making a stupid movie, to the point that they actually bother to reference other stupid movies. Dead Snow is an example of one of those 'so bad it's good' films, the kind you watch with a bunch of other people who are all halfway inebriated and amused by impossible decapitation. Stupid and campy and gory and fun, Dead Snow will entertain even while it lowers your functional IQ.

When I reviewed Copper, I mentioned how little I care for most episodic cop shows. The formula of catching a different bad guy every week is trite and unrealistic, and becomes painfully difficult to believe. Hell, some of those CSI shows are practically science fiction.

But The Wire is the kind of television that lets us know cop shows can be awesome. There's no formula. There are no neat ribbon-tied endings. There's no needless drama or hair-raising feats of derring-do. There are cops who do their jobs, and there are bad guys who do their jobs, and there are all the people affected by this cycle. And then there's the story.

If I had to pick one word to describe The Wire, it would be 'natural.' Everything about The Wire happens naturally, never forced, never gimmicky. The acting is superb. The story develops organically - there's no pre-determined ending, just the sort of cause-and-effect that actually makes things happen. Dealers sell drugs; cops go after them; people get killed. There are surprises and events that you didn't see coming, but they're not tricks or plot devices. The story can surprise you because life can surprise you.

The people who made The Wire did their research, too. The show feels real because the writers did more than just have a couple police on set. I have a cop friend who is also watching The Wire, and from the stories he tells me, I have absolutely no problem believing that the writers for The Wire have an exceptionally deep understanding of how actual police work.

For one thing, The Wire doesn't pretend that all cops are superheroes. It willingly acknowledges that lots of police are less than stellar human beings. Many cops are ladder-climbing political whores. Many more are just power-tripping bullies. And a bunch, a pretty fair-sized number, are damned serious about protecting and serving, and they're hamstrung by the fact that they are all government employees.

The Wire never shrinks from blatantly indicting what are otherwise sacred cows. Corrupt black politicians who trade on their race to keep them rich and in power. Police commissioners who are more concerned with looking good on paper than with stopping crime. Incompetent detectives who are only riding their desks until retirement. Reporters who will stop at nothing to get a good story - even if it means making it up themselves. I could keep going, but I might end up spoiling something.

However, just because some of the characters are assholes doesn't mean they're villains. The top brass might be fudging crime stats, but if they are, it's because the mayor's office is putting too much pressure on them. They might be decent guys who have to do what it takes to make ends meet. The detectives might have once been gung-ho crimefighters, but now they're jaded and exhausted by a system that lets complete outsiders tell them how to do their jobs (and often prevents them from doing it at all). Even the drug dealers, the guys we assume should be the bad guys, are often quite sympathetic. They're selling heroin because it's the only thing they know how to do.

Now, I've told you how well The Wire reflects real life, but that isn't enough to make a show this amazing. To make a series as powerful and brilliant as The Wire requires more than knowledge of how things really work. To be this good, the characters and the story have to be enthralling. And they are. Which at this point is probably redundant.

The trap into which most TV writers fall is a need to make the show more interesting than real life. The hero doesn't just get in a gun fight; he blasts away at four assassins and then leaps off a pier to save a drowning infant. Cops dive to the ground just as the car bombs fill the screen with brilliant orange explosions. Dramatic last-minute rescues and perfect one-liners are the mainstay of television cops - but they're just as make-believe as Lord of the Rings.

Real life is fascinating. I could tell you about how my grandfather was one of four pilots from an entire carrier who survived an air battle against the Japanese, how he floated in the Pacific for hours after giving his lift vest to a fellow sailor. Or I could tell you stories about how my old man called in artillery on the Viet Cong, or how he was badly wounded months later. Hell, I could tell you my own stories, about being in the middle of a bush war in Uganda or how my first girlfriend and I saw a man die. Real like does not need to be tricked-up to be interesting, and the writers of The Wire know that.

The Wire does more than just show us a believable story in a realistic setting. It goes the extra mile and makes it amazing. It makes you care about the people, the kids whose parents are drug addicts and the cops with the drinking problems. It punches you in the stomach and then holds your hair back while you puke. It shows us people - real, believable, natural people - and it makes you love them, even when you hate them.

And as if that wasn't enough, it makes you think. It makes you wonder what we could do differently. It makes you want to get involved. It makes you want to take up arms against a sea of troubles (although not in a Shakespearean-suicidal-tendencies kind of way). It makes you care, not just about the fictional characters you see on your screen, but about actual junkies and homeless people and embattled cops. It makes you want to find out more, and it makes you want to be more than a spectator in your own story.

I just finished the show last night, and I am equal parts glad to have seen it through to the end, and sad that there is no more to watch. It was moving and powerful and brilliant, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always thoroughly enjoyable. I know I'm enjoying the afterglow right now, so my opinion could be colored by the recency of the experience, but I can't think of any television show I've ever seen than was as good as the Wire. From now on, every show I enjoy will have me saying, 'it was good, but it wasn't The Wire.'

I owe a special 'thank you' to readers who commented on my Copper review for turning me on to this amazing show. Hopefully someone will read this and say, 'man, I really need to watch that,' and then I will have paid it forward.

I recently conducted an extensive interview with the creators of Mage Wars to find out a little history behind the game. They told me that the game idea came from a 14-year-old boy who was looking through Playboy magazines and wondering what the girls would look like with magic undergarments and gnarly monsters. That horny teen mentioned to his father, who was a nerd, that he wished he could play a game where half-naked women fought awesome monsters and shot stuff with lightning. His dad, who was also horny, thought this sounded like a magnificent idea, and so they created Mage Wars.

That is not true. I did not interview the creators of Mage Wars. I talked with one of their marketing guys at a convention, but we mostly just talked about beer. I don't know if the randy teenage nerd story is real, but I kind of doubt it. Though if you look at the art in Mage Wars, it totally could be.

Mage Wars might not have the most original title ever, or even a particularly original game idea. Spellcasters dueling in an arena is only slightly less innovative than a game about zombies. But what it does have is the best implementation of the mage-off I've ever played. And considering how many wizard-on-wizard games are out there, that's saying something.

The best way to sum up the game play in Mage Wars is that it's like Magic: The Gathering and Summoner Wars met in a bar, and Summoner Wars got Magic knocked up, but then Magic drank during the entire pregnancy and went into labor early, but the baby was fine anyway and didn't get fetal alcohol syndrome or anything, and went on to go to an Ivy League school and never meet its real father. You have a lot of card play and deckbuilding, and you also have cards as miniatures moving around on a big grid. And those two things are like Magic and Summoner Wars.

However, once you get past the initial similarities, Mage Wars is definitely its own game. For one thing, the longest game of Magic I ever played was still over in 40 minutes, and if you finish Mage Wars that fast, one of you is very bad at the game - or someone is cheating. Mage Wars has a lot more game than the other two combined, and while I definitely enjoy both love-child parents, Mage Wars is deeper than either of its predecessors.

Instead of a deck, Mage Wars give you a spellbook. This is still a whole bunch of cards, but you keep them in a little card folder, and every turn you prepare two spells. You pick those spells, so you never go, 'dammit, I just can't get the cards I need,' unless you're a moron. However, this also means that it slows down a little bit, because if you can't decide what spells to ready that turn, you just sit scratching your chin whiskers for five minutes while the other player silently fumes.

And instead of giving you just a few smart options to do on your turn, Mage Wars practically lets you do whatever you want. You can summon gorgons and demons to do your fighting for you, or you can gear up and send your mage right into the fray. You can throw up magical walls of fire, hurl mind-bending delay tactics, or seed the field with diabolical traps. There are so many options that choosing your actions for any given turn can be an agonizing decision. And then when your opponent turns your heaviest hitter to stone and you strands him in a cloud of poison gas that eats at his rocky innards and you didn't prepare a dispel, you also have the options to curse loudly and flip the table (unless it's my table, because my table is really, really heavy. You would both have to cooperate to flip my table).

Planning and strategy and clever tactics play into every step of the game. Charging too fast might be the wrong move at one point and the best possible play at another. You might decide to stick with ranged attacks and wind up allowing your opponent to bring out too much strength on his own, or you could devote effort to close-up brawls and wind up mired in defensive safeguards. It's not easy to see what the best plan would be until your enemy blasts you with a lightning bolt and turns your healers into meat pies.

I love Mage Wars. I've played several times now, and every time, I find some new trick or cool combo or neat ability. I can't wait for expansions, and I intend to pick up the supplemental card decks so I can build more custom spellbooks. I'll play any time I've got two hours and a willing opponent. But I should definitely offer some warnings, in case you're thinking about buying Mage Wars.

This is not anything like a light game. There are 44 pages of rules, and you'll be referring to them the entire time you're playing. If Mage Wars was any less European, it would come with firearms and hookers. It could take you three hours to finish your first game, and if you're not a quick study, you'll have to play a couple times before you know what you're doing. In other words, this is not a game for pussies. Casual nerds need not apply.

On the other hand, if you like a game with meat on it - and not like a slice of sandwich meat, but that giant turkey leg you can get at the renaissance faire - you want Mage Wars. If you want a game that will make your head spin with all the stuff you can do on your turn, you want Mage Wars. If you want a game where all the dudes wear head-to-toe armor and the chicks show up in Victoria's Secret, you want Mage Wars.

Basically, if you're a serious nerd who likes awesome games, you want Mage Wars.

Summary

2 players (more if you're feeling frosty)

Pros:
Deep and smart
Lots of planning and strategizing
Smart tactical plays are critical

Cons:
Heavier than an unwanted fruitcake
Rabid feminists may be offended (I am not, as I actually like naked women)

 So you need a monster of a two-player game that you can use to murder an entire afternoon? Here you go:

https://arcanewonders.com/arcanewonders/games/mage-wars-core-set-detail

If you're not a huge comics nerd (and I swear, I'm not… well, not any more), you may have missed Y: The Last Man. It's not a superhero book. In fact, there's almost nothing super about it. Some of the people are total bad-ass hard-ons, but for the most part, it's a story of regular people in irregular times.

In the first issue of this incredible series, every living creature on the planet bearing a Y chromosome dies at the same time. They're talking, walking, flying planes, holding press releases, fighting battles - and BAM, every single male of any species pukes blood and drops dead. Men and pigs and cows and horses, all simultaneously toast.

Except Yorick and his pet monkey.

That's the premise of this incredible book, but it's not entirely what the book is about. Like the best science fiction, Y: The Last Man uses an impossible situation to discuss issues that resonate with readers living in a completely normal world. Gender roles are the most obvious starting point, but the story expands to touch on depression and religion, nationalism and crime, power and greed. This is a thought-provoking, intelligent tale that proves beyond any doubt that comic books can be incredible, if we just quit trying to put gunfighters in brightly colored spandex.

As soon as Yorick discovers that he's the last surviving male on the planet, he sets out from Boston to find the love of his life, who is unfortunately in Australia on a research grant. That's a bit of a commute for a guy who can't just jump on a plane, due largely to the fact that there are not really very many planes running any more. Most of the pilots were dudes, and the women who are left are not trying to get American Airlines back to JFK International.

The result is a sort of buddy movie crossed with a road movie crossed with a comic book. A few fascinating characters emerge as the story unfolds. We meet Agent 355, the assassin-spy assigned to protect Yorick on his travels. We meet Dr. Mann, whose work with cloning may unlock the secret to saving the world. There's Alter, the Israeli leader who intends to capture Yorick and make her country the only nation to survive the apocalypse. And Hero, Yorick's sister, is a troubled woman attempting to cope with the dark deeds she commits when she allows herself to fall prey to her doubt and despair.

The characters in Y: The Last Man are, by necessity, mostly females. After all, if there were more than one male character, the title would be all wrong. But even male readers can identify with the living, breathing survivors of a world-changing catastrophe. We can see ourselves in the drug-smuggling ship's captain, the tough congresswoman, or the small-town survivors who make the best of a tough situation.

And the story doesn't just show us villains or heroes. Like the best stories, sometimes the bad guys are completely likable, and sometimes the good guys are total douchebags. Hell, for most of the characters, there is no good or bad. There's just people doing what people do. And this realistic approach to a fantastic situation makes the story believable and compelling and impossible to put down.

The best part about reviewing Y: The Last Man is that the story is done. It ran for about five years before wrapping it all up. The result is sixty comics that tell an incredible tale. You can buy it in ten collected editions, but those are only in print, and these days, the only way I buy comics is on Comixology. If you want it that way, you can only get the issues one at a time, but that's actually better, because this way you can see all the amazing work that was done on the covers.

I don't read many comic books any more. Most of the comics being made today are about superheroes, and I'm done with superheroes. They don't make any sense, their timelines are completely screwed, and they keep trotting out the same tired characters rather than letting them die off and making new ones. I have exceptionally high standards when it comes to comics (except for Darkbrain - their comics are horrible, but the porn is hilarious), and so when I find one that's worth reading twice, I like to crow about it. If you haven't read Y: The Last Man, you're in for a treat. And if you have, go back and read it again. It's that good.