Advance Review: “Saga” By Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples | The Beat

Just finished reading the first two issues of Saga, and I really really liked it. Review from The Beat by Todd Allen sums it up rather nicely:

What we have here, as you’ve found if you’ve read any press about Saga, is a couple from opposite sides and species of an armed conflict falling in love and having a baby. Unfortunately, they’re army deserters, so the powers that be would like to have them in front of a firing squad for that and that’s before they’re horrified by the relationship.

What’s going on in the first issue is world building and establishing the personalities of the players. You have a bewildered new father who’d really like to just stay low to the ground. You have a mother who may be less of a pacifist now that she has a child to protect. You have a mercenary pursuing them who’s disgusted by the entire situation. You have a royal chasing them who’d much prefer to be having his own child. As all this goes on, the story is narrated by the child born in the opening pages from sometime in the unspecified future.

The motivations are there and, perhaps more strikingly, the world created is immersive. A lot of the immersion credit should go to [Artist Fiona] Staples. At the Image Expo, she described her art process and going back to animation cells and thinking about figure and backgrounds. The result has the landscape playing as much a part as the foreground in some places. There appears to be a conflict between a race of magicians and a race of technologists (there’s also a race of robot people, but I’m not entirely sure how they fit in the hierarchy). Our heroes are stumbling around in a world where the rayguns and magic wands converge and neither seems out of place. Where styles could clash, sense of wonder and surrealism are invoked. Not an easy trick, but one that’s pulled off well. I think my favorite oddity of the book was something called a “lying cat.” There are plenty of oddities in this book and most of them are glorious in their strangeness.

It’s not hyperbole – this is one of the most engaging new comics to be released in many years. Whilst the influences are obvious (Romeo & Juliet, Star Wars, Chronicles of Narnia), both writer and artist have set out their stall with swaggering confidence. They clearly have their own story to tell.

[Footnote: The Hollywood Reporter has comments by writer Brian K. Vaughan that Saga is not intended to be adapted for TV or film. Unlikely, if the comic is successful enough, but a fantastic mini-manifesto to be working from.]