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 #15 – Review

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

The Story: Alana and Marko are defeated—by the greatest board game ever made.

The Review: Vaughan made an interesting choice at the top of this arc when he opened on Prince Robot catching up to Alana and Co. on Quietus.  He seemed to be setting things up for an imminent confrontation, but the succeeding issues don’t seem to be in any hurry to have one.  Even so, the knowledge that our favorite space family will soon encounter new troubles casts all their doings in a different light than if you just took them on their own.

Basically, we have a ticking time bomb of about a week before Robot arrives.  In this issue, Hazel tells us that we’re on day five.  Her family only has two more days before their “blissful” time with Heist is over—but they don’t know it yet.  That’s the tragic part, as it is with all situations of dramatic irony.  As sweet and fun as it is to see the gang play Nun Tuj Nun, a Wreath board game that crosses Pictionary, arm-wrestling, and psychological warfare all at once, their activities have a certain amount of poignancy, too, because you know it can’t last.

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 #13 – Review

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

The Story: For once, a mother-in-law gets her ear chewed off.

The Review: Fresh from three big wins at the Eisner Awards, and still riding a powerful wave of near-universal popular and critical acclaim, Saga comes back from its second hiatus raring and ready for another banner year.  While I certainly share in the enthusiasm for the series, I have to admit that the sheer amount of love it’s received has surprised me—in a pleasant, if bewildering, way.  After all, once you strip it down, Saga has really been a modest little story thus far.

Or perhaps it only seems that way because Vaughan spends so much time fixating on individual characters, rarely pulling back to reveal the larger context they’re operating in.  So much of Saga’s tension comes from personal acrimony among the cast, to the point where you start to lose sight of the bigger stakes within the story.  It gets so you even occasionally forget there’s a war going on in the background.  This ain’t Star Wars, is all I’m saying.

Saga #11 – Review

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

The Story: Will this tree hold together long enough to escape a mini black hole?

The Review: I don’t think there will ever be an outright bad issue of Saga; the caliber of both the writer and artist is just too strong for that.  But I think within the title’s spectrum of excellence, the issues that fall within the lower range will be those that, once you get past the entertainment value of the words themselves, don’t quite advance the plot very much or short-change a part of the story that can use more development.

That said, we always have to keep in mind that Vaughan prefers the piecemeal method of storytelling on this series.  There’ll be times when he’ll hold back or cut short what seems to you the natural progression of a scene so he can deliver it later, at a more opportune time.  Such is the way he’s dealing with these flashbacks of Alana and Marko’s early relationship days.  We basically went from the painful initial meeting directly to the first kiss, without ever seeing the fairly important steps between.  While I’m sure Vaughan has a clear timeline for when he wants us to see those scenes, it can be a little annoying to experience them out of order like that.

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.

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.

Saga #5 – Review

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

The Story: According to Marko and Prince Robot IV, fatherhood actually increases testosterone.

The Review: Characters in the sci-fi genre sure talk and act differently from us, don’t they?  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but they seem somewhat more formal and calculated in their general manner than us modern folks have gotten used to.  Using Star Wars as an example, you either go from the stately extreme of Obi-wan Kenobi to the total incoherence of Jar Jar Binks, with maybe some measured relaxation from Han Solo.

But then Star Wars is a product of its time, and media manners of that time were somewhat stricter.  People on TV and in the movies certainly didn’t talk like people who actually lived during that period did.  We live now in a decade where the differences between fictional language and real-life language are negligible, give or take an F-bomb here and there.  It’s hard to deny that we—and by that I mean Americans in general—have become a pretty crude society, even on a purely linguistic level.

Saga #4 – Review

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

The Story: Alana and the Will blow some steam, but only one actually kills anybody.

The Review: If you were ever a fan of Vaughan’s seminal work on Runaways, you probably got hooked by its down-to-earth, naturalistic dialogue and its devotion to making the gang of kids come across as relatable as possible, despite the incredibly weird circumstances they had to live with (e.g. telepathically controlled pet velociraptor).  Those same qualities have been a major strength of Saga from the start, getting you closely invested in characters completely unlike you.

And while that remains true, this issue begs you to take note of the potential side-effects from Vaughan’s writing style: a glut of exposition and thus a slowdown on the plot, which—let’s face it—hasn’t exactly run on Indy 500 speed this whole time.  By plot, I mean the galactic war going on, and each side’s shared interest in pursuing Marko, Alana, and Hazel.  At this point, you still don’t know why there’s a war in the first place, and you have a feeling that our protagonists’ real adventures still haven’t begun.

Saga #3 – Review

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

The Story: Perfect timing—Marko and Alana could really use some spiritual help right now.

The Review: We talk a lot about “twists” in fiction, but what are they, really?  They can’t be just surprises, because there are plenty of things that surprise you, but you wouldn’t call them twists—like when your pals throw you a birthday party three weeks before your birthday because they forgot exactly when your birthday is.  Same thing with things that shock you; you wouldn’t exactly call a disastrous car accident a twist either.

My theory: a fictional twist, particularly a good one, is when the writer upsets expectations you didn’t even know you had.  So really, the impact of the unexpected event comes not from the occurrence itself, but from a lot of purposeful groundwork beforehand.

Saga #2 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (writer), Fiona Staples (artist)

The Story: And now we all know why camping in the woods isn’t as fun as it sounds.

The Review: I was amused to discover when I visited Comics Unlimited this week that they had begun to sell Saga in a plastic wrapper on the stands.  To make it clear, I had seen no other title sold in this manner in my entire patronage of the store.  So what is it about this series that it seems so necessary to protect your casual readers from?  It can’t be the swearing nor the nudity; the average Vertigo title has just the same amount and often uses it more blatantly.

Perhaps it’s the completely unromantic way the title approaches the least glamorous yet most human parts of ourselves.  If last issue’s portrayal of Alana’s labor didn’t make that clear to you, then the revelation of her “secret” in this issue will.  To save herself, Hazel, and Marko from killer vines, Alana admits, “I enjoy the taste of my own breast milk.”  (Don’t ask how this works—it’s almost irrelevant anyway.)  She then explains, “Hazel spit up in my mouth last night.”  Gross, but having babysat in my day, entirely plausible.  Yet this hardly seems like reason enough to restrict the series’ accessibility.

I’m not sure the violence and gore has anything to do with it either.  The average issue of Animal Man sports more blood, guts, and deformity than anything this issue coughs up.  Given how the mention of the Horrors strikes fear into even a professional assassin (one who’s not exactly easy on the eyes herself), you’d expect them to be, well, horrifying.  And at first glance, they’re not; but when you really think about what they are, they become horrifying indeed.

You can never forget that behind every scene and plotline here, there’s a never-ending war going on.  Vaughan reminds you this conflict involves more than just the fates of the protagonists by showing how this very world they stand upon has been devastated as a result of their respective races.  For that reason, even though they’re victims themselves, Marko, Alana, and Hazel must make examples of themselves, and sometimes that requires sacrifice.