For every guy who's ever heard the retort, "Not if you were the last man on Earth," and for every girl who's wondered what it would be like if women ran the world, "Y: The Last Man" is one comic-turned-movie to watch.

"It's so cool," promised director D.J. Caruso ("Disturbia"). "It'll be a really cool piece."

Granted, the concept is familiar — but it's usually done as camp, sci-fi or horror, with the latter focused on determining why a portion of the human population died out, while the survivors try to avoid the same fate alongside any resulting zombies or vampires (see "28 Days Later" or the upcoming "I Am Legend"). But "Y: The Last Man," which creator Brian K. Vaughan optioned to New Line, treats the topic very differently.

"The plague that has killed all of the men comes up often in science fiction," Vaughan said, "but it's either written by chauvinist pigs who have the lone survivor running around saving helpless women or by really well-intentioned men who have all the women go down to the U.N. and hold hands and declare an end to war, and there's peace all over the planet. I thought both of those takes were sort of disrespectful to women."

In Vaughan's long-running comic book series, which is heading toward its conclusion later this year, womankind is far from united, and war is far from over — especially not when the Israeli army has women trained in combat. Our hapless hero, Yorick, who survived the plague along with his pet monkey, Ampersand, has to navigate his way through this new world, which is alternately helpful and hostile to him. "There are all these pockets of women who are trying to get him for different reasons," Caruso said. "The Israeli army, for one, is a really strong force and presence in trying to bring Yorick down and chasing him across the country."

Adds Vaughan, "The only thing that unites all the feminist writers, from Andrea Dworkin to Naomi Wolf, is that if you lock them in a room, they would murder each other. There is not one singular feminist school of thought but many, so each town Yorick travels through represents each school of thought. They all respond in incredibly different ways."

Which is why some women — the Daughters of the Amazon, for instance, who lop off a breast to represent their militancy — want to kill Yorick, while others want to breed him. The plague, then, becomes the McGuffin, Vaughan said, "just setting everything into motion. For me, it's more about Yorick being the last boy on Earth and his journey towards becoming the last man on Earth. The personal stories are much more interesting than the grand sci-fi nature of it."

"Y" is reaching its 60th issue, but Caruso and "Disturbia" screenwriter Carl Ellsworth are distilling the movie version to focus on the first 12 issues, "sort of combining them into a beginning, middle and end," Caruso said. "The problem is that even in the first 12, there is so much great stuff, it's like, what do you leave out? There really isn't a ticking clock with Yorick, so what we basically did was give him a reason to get from Boston to California in a really short time."

With Caruso and Shia LaBeouf's already-established working relationship ("Disturbia" and the upcoming "Eagle Eye"), does the director already have his "last man"? "This is funny, but unbeknownst to me: Shia was already chasing this part prior to anything," Caruso said. "I haven't talked to him yet about it because he's off shooting 'Indiana Jones 4,' but Shia is the right type and the right personality because you want to have the humor, but you also want to have the seriousness. So we'll talk about it when we get there."

In a random sampling outside New York's Midtown Comics, fans told MTV News they could see Mark Ruffalo, Ryan Gosling and Tobey Maguire as good Yoricks. (Vaughan himself has no opinion, saying his "cop-out answer" is that the only Yorick he can imagine is the one on the page.)

Vaughan originally wrote a draft of the "Y" screenplay himself, but with Ellsworth aboard, he's now freed up to write the script for an adaptation of another one of his comic series, "Ex Machina," also optioned to New Line. "I'm a big sellout now," Vaughan joked. Not that Hollywood has really gone to his head, though — he's just as excited to be writing for "Lost" and penning the Faith arc of the new "Buffy" comic.

"I'm grateful for the opportunity to adapt another of my works," he said, "but a lot of people see comics as a glorified screenplay, like, 'It's OK, but we're really waiting for the movie,' like that's the goal. For me, comic books were always the destination. Movies are gravy; they're nice, but it's the comic that matters most to me."

Visit Movies on MTV.com for more from Hollywood, including news, reviews, interviews and more.

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.

Want trailers? Visit the Trailer Park for the newest, scariest and funniest coming attractions anywhere.