Short Box: Saga TP 11

Saga HC / TP

#11

Release: Nov 29, 2023

Creators

Dear Brian K. Vaughan,
You are a bad man! And you made me cry.
And furthermore…

The Family Guy reference above pops into my head every single time I read a new collection of Saga.

Of course, I don’t really think that Brian K. Vaughan is a bad man, but he does make me cry every single time, and this time around might have been the time he made me cry hardest.

I won’t get into details here, but if you don’t know what Saga is, you should. It’s one of those comics that is on my list to recommend to people who are curious about what comics they should get into simply because it has something for pretty much everyone because it’s a mix of genres.

There’s magic, there’s science fiction, there are heroes and villains, there’s romance, there’s comedy, there’s drama, and, of course, there’s tragedy. So much tragedy.

The basics: for longer than anyone can remember, two races have been at war, a war that has been fought on proxy worlds throughout the galaxy, as the two races are neighbors who don’t want to risk damaging their homes. On one side are the winged, science-using inhabitants of the planet Landfall, and on the other are the horned, magic-using inhabitants of Landfall’s moon, Wreath.

Most everyone else in the galaxy has chosen a side, and the galaxy’s economy is almost entirely built on the war and dependent upon its continuation. In the midst of this, against all odds and the assumed rules of nature, a horned man and a winged woman fell in love and had a baby.

And everyone disliked that.

And so the titular saga is that of this beleaguered family trying to find safety and stability in a hostile universe, and the friends and enemies they make along the way.

One of the things that makes the series so compelling is the familiarity of it all, as the setting is very much like our world – which allows for a great deal of social commentary – just a version that has aliens and magic in it. Artist Fiona Staples has a particular talent for designing characters that somehow look completely alien but very much like us at the same time.

I don’t have much more to say than that, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that this series exists, it’s still ongoing and has been collected in eleven volumes to date, and, if you have a heart, it will make you cry. But it will also make you smile, and make you eager to get hurt again and again.

Plus, if you read it, you’ll finally know what the deal is with that weird-looking cat saying, “Lying” that you’ve no doubt seen on the internet many times throughout the years.

Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.