Saga #18 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)

The Story: When confronted by your raging ex-fiancée, resist the urge to push your wife off a building.

The Review: While I usually shy away from conflating what I like to see in a story with what is actually good in a story, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that usually, the more developed characters, the better.  If a series is interested in longevity, it’s got to build up its inventory so that it always has a source of material to turn to.  If you can make even your minor, interstitial characters worth their page-time, you’re pretty much golden.

It’s this quality that makes Saga special among comic books.  I can name a goodly number of titles that are character-driven, that take great care of its stars, but it’s hard to think of any that loves all its characters the way Saga does.  How often do non-talking animals in fiction get developed beyond their cute factor?  It’s got to say something about Vaughan that even Lying Cat gets a backstory and motivations undefined by its various partners.  Cat is no gimmick; he’s a legitimate member of the Saga cast.

Saga #17 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)

The Story: No better time for a literary discussion than during a hostage situation.

The Review: Ever since #12, when Vaughan revealed that Marko, Alana, and Co. had arrived at Heist’s lighthouse a week before Prince Robot, we’ve been eagerly waiting for the story to catch up to the highly tense confrontation between the soldier and the writer.  With nearly all of Saga’s forces converging on the same place at once, you know that no matter which way the encounter turns, everything will change when it’s over.

And so it goes.  Spoiler alert—the death of Heist, all things considering, was probably to be expected.  Surprising as it is to see his romance with Klara nipped just before it had a chance to bloom, Heist was the only truly expendable character at the lighthouse.  Not that Vaughan is the type of writer who’d be squeamish about killing off a principal character relatively early on in the series (Barr did die within several issues of being introduced), but the time just isn’t right for anyone else to die yet—not until their story arc reaches some resolution, at least.

Saga #14 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)

The Story: Hazel gets an unconventional, but literally cleansing, baptism.

The Review: To the owners and operators of Comics Unlimited—much as I revere and adore your store and happy as I am to funnel my increasingly scanty funds into your business, this ridiculous business with slipping Saga in into plastic sleeves with a mature content warning sticker has got to stop.  At least, read through an issue to make sure there’s some actual explicit content in there before wrapping it up.  It’s just environmentally the smart thing to do.

This issue could easily have gone on the shelves without the extra non-biodegradable packaging without raising too many eyebrows.  Aside from the Stalk’s nips and a rather jaw-dropping panel of author Heist puking out his guts (from emotion!) onto Hazel, this is probably the least offensive issue of Saga yet, both visually and textually.  Even if you find something graphically objectionable to it, the issue more than redeems itself with moments of pure, if bruised, heart.

A lot of it, as with the best works of fiction, is in the little things: Klara’s growing rapport with the family’s ghostly nanny (“Ready your side of the ether, Izabel.  At this rate, we’ll be ghosts by dawn…”) or the faith Alana’s stepmom still has in her despite their estrangement (“Our girl may have her problems, but Alana isn’t a turncoat.  She was…she is a good person.”).

Saga #10 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)

The Story: Most mothers only joke that it feels like they’re giving birth to a little planet.

The Review: In Saga #8, we got a deeper glimpse into A Night Time Smoke, a book which figures heavily in Alana’s history as a soldier and whose contents interested Prince Robot too much to just be a trashy romance.  Clearly, there’s more to the book than a steamy attraction between a flesh-and-blood girl and a rock monster, but what that is exactly is more of a mystery, as well as the exact impact it had on our heroes’ lives.

Here, we finally learn more about the exact nature of A Night Time Smoke.  Despite the rather mundane language Alana reads from the book, the words seem to stun Marko.  Amazingly, he sees “[i]t’s not a love story at all, is it?  It’s about us, about the war between Landfall and Wreath.”  You should read the excerpt of the book yourself, but as an English major, even I feel there’s some extreme extrapolation going on for Marko to make that conclusion.

Saga #9 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)

The Story: The Will and Gwen strike the slave traders like lightning out of a clear orange sky.

The Review: I’ve often made the point that when it comes to critiquing comedies, they often get away with more since their only real goal is to make you laugh.  If they do that, then it almost doesn’t matter if they have much of a point, if their character work is consistent, or if their plot goes anywhere.  Dramedies have it a little harder—they have to make you laugh and they’ve got to have some substance—but they still have it easy compared to straight dramas.

I really, really hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I sometimes feel that a large part of Saga’s popular appeal is its clear dramedy status.  The basic premise of the title is, after all, very simple, even pedestrian: lovers who incur the wrath of their respective groups, now persecuted by all.  Furthermore, Vaughan doesn’t go out of his way to deliver a particularly nuanced view of the overarching conflict.  From the start he established the war between the winged and horned people as senseless and pointless; its only purpose is to provide a specter of tension and give a reason for the characters to move forward.