Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume11 (Image 2023)
On Christmas morning, I found my granddaughter lying on the bedroom floor exercising her new reading skills on this book, a gift to me from her father.
‘Um,’ I said, ‘that book is really for grown-ups, not for kids.’ She took the hint, and went out to play with her tiny beads and figurines.
I did a quick check for any of the grossness that occasionally featured in the previous ten volumes. The elliptical text of the first chapter would bemuse any newcomer to the world of Saga, however practised at reading, and the one obscenity is tucked away discreetly at the bottom of a page. So far so good! And there was mostly no cause for alarm: conversations among odd-looking people (horns, TV screen faces, wings, a beak, a pig-snout, that kind of thing), a green cat, stars and planets, sundry science-fiction paraphernalia. But oh dear: a full-page nightmare figure with a horned skull and a hole blown through his chest; a naked man and woman side by side on a bed, the woman full frontal, the man face down, then more images of the woman as she gets up and dresses.
I don’t expect any lasting damage was done, but the Saga series is not for small children.
On the other hand, if you’re an ex-child looking for an introduction to the joys of comics/graphic novels, this series would be a great place to start. (Not if you’re looking for evidence that the comic form can be deeply serious. For that, you could try Art Spiegelman’s Maus, or Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Saga does have serious themes, but mostly I read it for fun. Even those moral-panicky images in the first chapter turn out to serve a comic narrative – the nightmare image really is someone’s nightmare, and the naked couple are about to be sprung by a young person who scathingly disapproves of their hooking up.)
Don’t start with this volume. The series has been going for more than a decade, over 66 single issue magazines. What started out as a kind of space-operatic interspecies Romeo and Juliet story, as narrated by Hazel, the daughter of the forbidden union, has expanded to include a vast gallery of weird characters, and at least half a dozen locales and plot lines that progress in parallel. This volume doesn’t bother with a Story So Far. I did remember major plot points such as the death of a main character and the destruction of a home, and I recognised most of the characters, including Hazel herself and her immediate family, the cute but lethal Ghüs, and the dangerous green cat that calls out any lie. Before I read Volume 12 (may it come soon), I’ll make a point of reading all the preceding volumes. But Hazel’s narrative voice is strong, and the sense of her jeopardy keeps me emotionally engaged in the midst of all the bewildering complexity, the occasional violent spectacle, and by this time almost safe-for-work sexual scenes.
Brian K Vaughan is a brilliant storyteller, and Fiona Staples, who does all the art (pencils as well as inks and lettering), is equally brilliant.
The pages aren’t numbered, but here’s what I take to be page 76*.
There’s a lot that’s not on this page: no Hazel, who is now a teenager, and none of her laconic, hand-lettered commentary; none of Hazel’s immediate family; none of the TV-faced characters whose screens reveal their true thoughts and desires if they’re not careful; no sex and only the implied threat of violence; no spectacular space vistas.
It’s the second page of chapter 64. You can see how it moves the story along: the dark-winged character, clearly some kind of vampire, is hunting for Alana, Hazel’s mother. Though we don’t learn for sure that the smart-mouthed frog is who the winged man thinks he is, Fiona Staples’s creation of the characters is so distinctive, and for that matter so is Brian K Vaughan’s dialogue, that we can be confident that he is lying when he denies being him. He’s one of the good guys, one of the many creatures who have Hazel’s wellbeing at heart. We guess, correctly, that his yarn about ‘the other guy’ will lead somewhere interesting.
There’s something fabulous about a frog complaining about racism, and Saga as a whole can be read as a fable about racism: Horns and Wings must not mix. It’s not one of those comics that panders to the readers who complain when there’s a Black character in Star Wars or Captain America is a woman, any more than it kowtows to the moral guardians who clutch their pearls at the sight of a naked penis.
And look at that glorious artwork. First we’re inside a diner out of 50s US television, then the outside ‘shot’ has us back in the space opera. The setting doesn’t distract from the action, but roots it in a particular place. There are details that raise narrative questions. For instance, whose is the backpack and almost empty plate opposite the frog, and why is there a trunk under the table? One of those questions is answered two pages later.
Saga may not be suitable for six-year-olds, but I recommend it for anyone at least three times that age.
* That’s my age. when blogging about a book, I sometimes focus on page 76 to see what it shows about the book as a whole.
The adventures of Hazel, now at least five years old, and her two-species family continue.
The continuing adventures of bi-speci-al Hazel and her family.
In 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.
Me fail? I fly! 