Comics Corner by Thurm — Saga #5

Keep in mind, this is one of those books that’s hard to just jump into, because you don’t really know who the characters are.  They aren’t introduced to you, they’re just there, so, you’ll have some catching up to do.  I can see people having trouble getting into the story now with this issue for that reason.  But there’ s enough here to keep you entertained, and to make you want to know more, and a big part of that is how Vaughn handles the characters.

The characters are freaking awesome in this book.  They’re just so real, and realized, I guess.  They grow and change every single issue; we learn something newabout their past, or something happens that forces them to react and adapt in a certain way.  We’re getting to know them.  In this issue, our horn-headed hero, who has been so adamant about not killing people, suddenly blows a gasket when his wife and daughter are threatened (which is understandable, right?) and has to be stopped from killing lots of bad guys by his wife, who has previously had no real problem with such action, and she does it not because it’s right, but because he would hate himself for it after the fact.  Our antagonist (the “lord of shit vacations”) was shown to have a good heart last issue, but in this issue must deal with the fact that some people just can’t be helped, no matter how much you want to. And though he was retired, and had given up the bounty hunting business, he’s gonna get in one last time (at the expense of our heroes) out of the goodness of his heart (he wants the money to buy a little slave girl’s freedom).  The real antagonist, I’ll call him Prince TV Head (seriously, he’s a dude with a TV for a head, more or less, and he’s a prince) finds out that he’s gonna be a father, and if he wants to be there to see his child’s birth (and think about tv headed child birth for a second. . . ouch), he’d better get off his ass and get to tracking down our heroes double time, cause his father won’t let him back on the planet until he completes his mission.  These problems that the characters experience are totally believable and presented as such, even though this is a space opera, and one of our heroes has horns on this head, and the other has wings like a dragonfly.  There are choices to be made, decisions that will determine their fates, and our horn-headed hero says as much as he contemplates his actions in this issue.

So yeah, I’m really digging Vaughn’s story here.  Not to mention Fiona Staple’s art, which is great in a non-comic book sort of way.  I mean, it’s comic book art, but she is such a great storyteller in her own right.  You don’t even need to read the word balloons to know what’s going on in most of these panels (and as an aside, no narration here, just dialogue.  No captions, no inner thoughts, just emotion and speech), it’s that good.  Characters expressions say so much about what it being said, what they are thinking and feeling, and she does a great job of bringing to life these fantastic characters like TV Head and Stalk, an arachnid bounty hunter with eight eyes and legs and a great set of tits.  I mean, rarely does art work so well with the story and script as it does here.  It’s just something special all around,  She brings this world to life, and it’s just amazing to look at, page after page.

So do yourself a favor, pick up an issue of Saga.  It’s really good, grown up comics, no capes or powers, just people being people.  If you’re into that sort of thing.