A review by stiricide
Y: The Last Man, Vol. 5: Ring of Truth by Brian K. Vaughan

3.0

Original rating: 4 stars
2017 rating; 3 stars

Everything in this weirdly homophobic garbage world is still garbage, but at least we're finally done whining around the country and most of the shooting appears to have been shoot. Spoiler, it's the goddamn monkey, and now, as we head in to volume SIX, ffs, we're finally going to maybe start to figure out what the hell this whole plague thing was even about.

Also, remember when I complained about the Orientalism in Vol 3? Vaughan doubles down on it here, and tries to brand Rick as some racist schmuck for raising eyebrows at her name. "What, do you think everyone raised their eyebrows at Harrison FORD whenever he came to town?"

Here's the thing: Toyota is a made up word. It's not like Henry Ford naming his car after himself, then having lots of little surname-Fords all appearing to be named after a car. The Toyoda Loom company (Toyoda WAS a family name) invented, and trademarked it in the thirties. (The characters for Toyoda mean fertile fields or something. I learned all of this back in college, I'm not looking it up. Anyway, to dissociate from sounding too fuddy duddy, they played around with the brushstrokes of the characters - like how font designers might fiddle with serifs is a terrible analogy - and figured out how to make a similar sounding word that was free from such associations. Toyota. In the context of this fucking book, it's less like Henry Ford naming a car after himself, and more like Henry Ford deciding that his name was too pedestrian, so he named his company Flord. Than some other Ford, completely unrelated to Henry, decided Yeah! Flord! And changed their name TO Flord. And now Flord is a family name for some shitty mercenary in this poor book. Which, come on, IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED HERE.)

Well, that aside was more thoughts than I had on the entire volume, so eff it, on to Book 6.