Saga #20 – Review

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

The Story: It’s the typical Open Circuit story—sex, drugs, and money.

The Review: I’m sure I wasn’t the only one disheartened by last issue’s pronouncement that Alana and Marko are due to split up at some point—though #15 indicated they’ll still be involved in Hazel’s life together, no matter what—but what depressed me even further was the idea their parting would be due to something as cliché as work-family balance and a potential fling between Marko and a clearly flirty dance instructor he met in a park.

It’s possible, given Vaughan’s gift for the unexpected, that he could take this particular plotline in a different direction than you’re expecting, but I’m actually not holding out that much hope. The whole point of Saga is to maintain the normality of Alana and Marko’s relationship even against the backdrop of an intra-galactic war, and there is nothing more normal in a relationship than the imprudent affair that sends it astray. Hence Vaughan makes no effort to disguise the burgeoning chemistry between Marko and Ginny, as the dance teacher calls herself. She even goes so far as to mention, quite needlessly (but very purposefully, methinks), that her husband “is on the road most of the year.”

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 #6 – Review

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

The Story: It’s a bad sign when your husband hasn’t told your in-laws about you.  Or your baby.

The Review: You can always tell the ripening of a plot when the various threads begin to weave together.  In fact, you can say that’s really the moment a story begins.  Until then, you only have a handful of ideas, some more likely to succeed than others.  Once they intersect, they cease being individual parts you can judge separately; they must rise or fall together.  A strong plotline can prop up some weak ones, yet conversely, the weak can drag down the strong.

Vaughan is already ahead of the game here since every part of his story works just fine—more than fine—on its own.  While the fate of Alana, Marko, and Hazel is clearly the focus of this series, and you care about their happiness and downright survival several degrees more than you do with other characters, you also get heavily invested in the course of Prince Robot and the Will’s lives.