Tag Archives: Brian K. Vaughan

Saga 5, Fables 3 & 4

Posted on 7 Oct 2015 | 4 comments

Fiona Staples (artist) and Brian K Vaughan (writer), Saga Volume Five (Image Comics 2015)
Bill Willingham (writer), Mark Buckingham, Lan Medina, Bryan Talbot, Linda Medley and Steve Leialoha (artists), Todd Klein (letterer), Fables Vol. 3: Storybook Love (Vertigo 2004)
Bill Willingham (writer), Mark Buckingham, Craig Hamilton, P. Craig Russell and Steve Leialoha (artists), Todd Klein (letterer),  Fables Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers (Vertigo 2004)

One of my sons kindly went through his comics collection recently and put out a pile that I might be interested in. I passed on Swamp Thing and something about zombies (or they might have been vampires), but carried off a small swag. These are some of them.

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In Saga, Hazel, the child of parents from two different, warring species, has her father’s horns and her mother’s wings, or at least the beginnings of both. Her existence challenges the ideologies of both sides, and the little family has powerful enemies. In previous volumes they have had narrow escapes, acquired a number of bizarre allies and fellow travellers, and dealt with an apparently endless stream of weird, murderous monsters.

Though this instalment, in which Hazel is a toddler, continues to enthral and delight those of us who have the preceding four volumes under our belts, I wouldn’t recommend that you start with it. You’d still have the wit, the wonderful art, the occasional outrageous action, and even the underlying celebration of love and family, but you’d be left wondering if there was any coherent thread at all as the family members are spread across the galaxies.  I recommend reading Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4, in that order, before this one.

The series has a bit too much explicit sex for my taste. Not that it’s pornographic: I can’t, for example, imagine many people would find the sexual behaviour of the dragons in this book anything other than disgusting. I guess I find other people’s sexual activities and fantasies mildly embarrassing. There’s a bit too much graphic violence too, come to think of it. Oh, and there’s some romanticising of drugs, though the realisation that a main character comes to as a result of his stoned dreams is hardly endorsed by the narrative. None of those misgivings stop me from already hungering for Volume 6.

f3There are no giant dragon’s genitalia in Fables, but there’s enough human-looking sex to ensure that this series about fairy tale characters in exile isn’t for the very young. The tales are dark, though not exactly in the way the original fairy tales were dark: more like childhood noir. The big bad wolf is now Bigby Wolf, a tough-guy operative on the side of good who is – mostly – in human form. Old King Cole is a figurehead mayor of Fable Town while Snow White as his deputy really runs the show.  And so on. All in the midst of unsuspecting ‘mundies’ (short for ‘mundanes’). In Volume 3, the love story between Snow White and Bigby Wolf passes a significant milestone (see cover of Volume 4 below for a spoiler), tiny police mounted on talking mice do their bit for law and order, Bluebeard turns out not to have reformed as thoroughly as he claimed,  Prince Charming moves back in with one of his ex-wives when he realises there’s more to be gained there than by conning mundy women into supporting him, and a gun wielding Goldilocks does a lot of damage. What’s not to like?

f4In Volume 4, the framing story comes back to life. The characters are in exile because someone known as the Adversary had mustered a huge army and was murdering everyone in fairyland. Those who escaped set up a clandestine community known as Fable Town in New York City, with a farm upstate for those Fables (as the fairytale characters are known) who don’t look human. These two places have been hard enough to police so far, because as everyone knows, being a fairytale character is no guarantee of decent behaviour. In this issue one of the gates dividing the worlds is breached and, after centuries of believing themselves safe, the Fables face Tarantino-esque violence at an industrial level.

In a long-lasting comic series like this, one of the pleasures is the regular appearance of guest artists. Mark Buckingham is the principal artist, and it’s his gritty vision that dominates. Then for a retelling of an American folktale or an episode involving cute miniature characters, someone else (in these cases Bryan Talbot and Linda Medley respectively) shows us the familiar characters and milieux through a different lens. The lettering, by Todd Klein throughout, almost makes one regret the less labour-intensive digitised process that (I’m assuming) is used in more recent comics such as Saga.

Wikipedia tells me that this series has continued from 2002 almost to the present – issue 150 was released in July. I’m reading it in the trade paperbacks, so far up to issue 27. I have 18 books to look forward to.

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Minchin’s Storm, Vaughan’s Saga

Posted on 5 Jan 2015 | 2 comments

Tim Minchin, DC Turner & Tracy KingStorm (Orion 2014)
Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples, Saga, Volume Four (2014)

The slender rationale for including these books in a shared blog post is that they’re both comics, and I read them both in a single beach-side holiday afternoon.

Storm cover Storm had its first incarnation as a beat poem Tim Minchin performed in one of his musico-comic solo shows. DC Turner and Tracy King, animators, loved it and saw its potential for an animated film. When they happened to meet the man himself a little later they asked his permission, and voilà, after just a couple of years’ work by many people, their video was scoring millions of hits on YouTube. This is the comic book of the film of the poem.

The poem tells of a dinner conversation where one of the guests (‘Tim’, known mainly as ‘I’) throws civility to the wind and delivers a blistering rant in defense of evidence based medicine and the scientific method against another guest, the eponymous Storm, who persistently advocates hip irrationality. It’s funny, both in its remorseless point scoring and in its mockery of the protagonist’s probably futile passion. It’s also completely serious, and includes a sweetly lyrical evocation of the wonders of the actual world.

The book in effect performs the poem on the page, illustrations and typography doing the work of voice and music. When ‘Tim’, in full snarky flight, asks, ‘Do we actually think that Horton heard a Who?’, a pale blue Dr-Seuss elephant trunk pokes in from a corner of the frame. And there’s an extra comic dimension in images of the other diners’ reactions – I particularly like his wife’s scowl when he mentions the tattoos on Storm’s breasts.

And then there are the equivalent of DVD extras: a foreword by Neil Gaiman (such a nice touch to have one of the living masters of fantasy write approvingly of a book that could easily be misread as antagonistic to fantasy); accounts of the book’s genesis by the writer and the artists (they are called illustrators, but they are much more than that); and a selection of alternative covers by other comics artists.

Saga vol 4 This volume of Saga continues to be as funny, suspenseful and artfully told as the first three volumes. I just reread my blog post on those, and don’t have anything to add. Except possibly that it begins with a full page close up of the television-head of one of the aliens emerging from the birth canal, Hazel’s parents separate, Hazel herself is kidnapped by a television-headed insurgent, who has also kidnapped the one we saw being born. Sadly the next volume won’t be here for an awfully long time.

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Vaughan and Staples’ Saga

Posted on 20 Mar 2014 | 5 comments

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, Vol. 1 (Image Comics 2013)
—————– Vol. 2 (Image Comics 2013)
—————– Vol. 3 (Image Comics 2014)

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These are the first three volumes of the autobiography of Hazel, the child of a great romance between two people from different species. Her birth is something of a miracle, because no one was sure it was biologically possible – she is born with the beginnings of her mother’s wings and her father’s horns. More than that, the two species, originally from the planet Landfall and its moon Wreath, have been locked for centuries in bitter warfare that has spread to the whole galaxy. It’s an interstellar Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers don’t die, at least not before they’ve had a baby.

So it’s a mixture of science fiction and fantasy that wouldn’t be out of place as an extended Doctor Who narrative, though it includes a lot more physical and verbal grossness than would ever happen around the Tardis – male genitals can rarely have been portrayed as repulsively as in the images of the giant Fard in Volume 2, and the characters swear like troopers or inner-city hipsters.

Volume 1 begins with Hazel’s birth and ends with her paternal grandparents materialising on the young family’s organic, sentient spaceship, with a lot of bang-bang, kiss-kiss, magic and gore in between, as the lethal emissaries of several powerful organisations are out to kill Hazel’s parents and capture the baby.

In Volume 2, the chase continues. There are flashbacks to the parents’ courtship and the refreshingly frank conversation that followed hard on the moment of conception. Back in the present, the plot thickens when, among other things, Hazel’s father’s jilted fiancée joins forces with a mercenary named The Will, a planet turns out to be a giant egg (which hatches), and they visit someone who is either the wisest person in the universe or a hack romance writer.

By the end of Volume 3, Hazel – now a toddler – is miraculously still alive, along with her parents, her grandmother and her spectral babysitter. The cast of interesting characters, both allies and enemies, has expanded, as has the tally of dead bodies and ingenious monsters in their wake.

The first two of these books were a birthday present from a son who knows I’m interested in comics. I had misgivings. Having recently faced the fact that super-heroes are inherently boring, I was half expecting a similar epiphany about science fiction/fantasy comics. But no, these books are witty, warm, interestingly plotted, well-paced, and at heart sweet. (I say ‘at heart’ because the frequent nakedness, swearing and superficial cynicism do a good job of protecting the warm, soft, even idealistic core of the narrative.)

I also had misgivings about the art. But once you accept the demands of the genre, which evidently include a quota of garishness and bare flesh, Fiona Staples’ visuals are brilliant. I particularly like the way our heroine, Hazel’s mother, is lithe, tough, gorgeous, and fiercely maternal.

So I spent my own good money on the third book, which just arrived in Sydney’s Kinokuniya this week. Given that the story is narrated by Hazel in what sounds like a young adult voice, I imagine the series has another 20 or so years to cover. It’s coming out in monthly instalments, of which these three volumes cover the first 18. There’s an interesting interview with Brian K Vaughan on the Comic Book Resources site, which incidentally draws attention to a couple of details in Fiona Staples’ images that I hadn’t noticed, but that definitely move the story over into Mature Readers Only territory.

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