Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1 - Unmanned

This collects the first five issues of the series, published originally in 2002. Might be available at you local comic shop or larger book chains, but odds are you'll have to special order it or hunt around a little.

Word balloon sized summary
A plague has wiped out every male on earth – except one young man and his pet monkey. His quest for survival, love, and an explanation begins.

Who Makes it Happen
Brian K. Vaughan – writer
Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan, Jr. – artists
Published by DC comics, under the Vertigo (suggested for mature readers) imprint.

Genre Bending
Apocalypse lite. The grit and trauma of a world turned upside down, without much of the grit and trauma. The story takes itself seriously without getting intense.

Character studies
Yorick. The last man on earth. A fun character. A man with tremendous responsibility and zero common sense. He keeps the tone light and provides some comic relief. Unfortunately, his flippant and generally short-sighted attitude in the midst of the probable extinction of humanity make it a little hard to suspend belief.

Ampersand. The last non-human man on earth. Yorick’s not so helpful helper-monkey-in-training. A great plot prop. And you can never go wrong with monkeys.

Agent 355. Sort of a "secret agent Shaft". Minus the, um, shaft. She makes a great foil for Yorick. Which is good, because by herself she’d come across as generic.
Which is the problem with all the other female characters (which accounts for all the character, I guess). They are either one dimensional for the purpose of moving the plot or uninteresting. But this is only the beginning. The cast starts growing an extra dimension or two once the foundation is laid (meaning, in subsequent volumes of Y: The Last Man).

What I can tell you without hashing out the whole story.
This collection feels (appropriately) like act one of a three act play. We are introduced to situation, the conflicts, the main players and how they relate and what problems they are going to cause for each other (or themselves). Vaughan does a great job exploring the ramification of 51% of the populace dying. He covers, among other things, how the change affects politics, survival, transportation, group dynamics, identity, science, cult evangelists and more. And he continues to develop the world through the story beyond volume one.
Surprisingly, Vaughan shies away, at least for now, from the obvious shake up of the one man on a world full of women scenario: sex. And by not getting hung up on that pesky issue, we are allowed to explore other less predictable, more intriguing territory - such as how the US government survives and continues to operate (this was written pre-Condi. And, ya know, it’s fiction)
and a quasi-religous cult of harsh, new-world-feminism taken to the extreme (a group that especially un-fun if you are the last man standing).
Oh, and the book uses a narrative devise in which the story is told moving forward and backwards in time. This could have been used to greater effect, but does at least provide for some good foreshadowing teases.

I don’t know if it’s art…
Generally, I don’t like to speak of a comic artwork as a separate entity from the story. Comic art is an essential story-telling tool. You can have great visual story telling with very lousy drawing, or superb illustration that fails utterly and conveying the events.
But since it’s the sort of thing that everyone wants to know…
The artwork is pretty standard stuff. Nothing extraordinary. Very clear and straightforward. This is typical of many books published under DC’s Vertigo imprint – because the story styles tend not to lend itself to high-action, but are more cerebral or character driven in nature. The covers from the original issues, painted by J.G. Jones, sprinkled throughout the book and on the collections cover, are well conceived and intriguing.

Non-Comic Book Trivia
If the events of this book ever happened, this book would not be published. Like pilots and mechanical engineers, women are sorely underrepresented in the comic book industry.

In quantitative terms:
B/B+ Worth a read. But not going to the top of my list of recommendation, except to those who already read comics and may have missed it.