Wednesday 6 March 2013

So I Read Saga: Volume 1

A 250 word (or less) review of the first collected Saga volume
By Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Image Comics



My girlfriend loves Parenthood, a television show with the thesis that parenting is difficult and family is important. For a variety of reasons I don't especially care for this show. Saga is a comic about how parenting is difficult and family is important but with winged alien soldiers, magic space satyrs, television headed robot royalty, graphic sex, and space violence. And it is absolutely perfect. Saga is the story of a child of starcrossed lovers from opposite sides of a generations/ages/centuries old galactic war between the winged people of the planet Landfall and the magic horned/antlered people from its moon Wreath. Hazel, the newly born alien hybrid baby of Landfaller Alana and Wreathan Markos is seen as an abomination by both sides of the conflict and so this new family is hunted by the Landfaller forces, lead by Prince Robot IV, and by the Wreathans using freelance bounty hunters. It's all the chaos and love of new parents splashed with the insanity of a crazy space opera world. The writing from Vaughan is characteristically excellent (clever, snappy, and exciting) but with this confident swagger quality to it that's just so rock and roll. Staples art is, if anything, more amazing: this hyper-realistic painted style that is simultaneously vaguely surreal. It's remarkable and beautiful stuff. I have been anxiously waiting for this trade since this series inception with, based on its pedigree, bated breath and inflated expectations. This book still blew me away. Read it.


Word count: 244

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