The Sprawling, Empathetic Adventure of <i>Saga</i>
Image Comics’ space-opera comic-book series Saga imagines a vast universe with strange inhabitants. There’s a telepathic, bald cat who yowls “LYING” at people who don’t tell the truth. There’s a queer, disemboweled ghost who works nights as a sassy teenage babysitter. And there’s a drunken cyclops who writes trashy romance novels, but may secretly be the galaxy’s leading intellectual. In one scene, readers meet an assassin with the armless body of Venus de Milo; when she casts aside her skirt, she reveals the abdomen of a spider and eight legs clutching different weapons.
In short, can seem bewildering; but at its core are simpler themes of love, loss, and growth. The story begins with Alana, Marko, and their newborn daughter, Hazel—a taboo, inter-species refugee familyfleeing the intergalactic war between their home worlds. Yet over the dozens of issues released since ’s 2012 debut, co-creators Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan have lent humanity#50 is out this week.) Characters who might seem like one-note tropes—the jilted ex, the jaded gun-for-hire—become far more complicated. Former enemies turn into reluctant allies, and then beloved family members. Despite the magic and spacecraft, Vaughan writes and Staples inks to life a universe that looks, in many ways, like our own. (One arc even takes place in an area that resembles an American middle-class suburb, complete with trampolines and jungle gyms.)
