Three and a half years ago, Saga ended on something of a major moment. What was supposed to be a longish hiatus turned into a long hiatus, but that’s over. Hazel, Alana, The Will and some other friends old and new are back in Saga #55, drawn by Fiona Staples, written by Brian K. Vaughan and lettered/designed by Fonografiks.
Matt Lazorwitz: So, it’s been a while since we saw these characters, huh? I’m excited to see them back, and I’m excited to talk about them with you, Mark.
Mark Turetsky: It’s been so long, Matt! Have we, as a society, forgotten how to Saga?
It’s Only Been (the Longest) Four Years Between Issues
Matt: To answer your question above, I don’t think so, at least if Taco Bell is to be believed.
But seriously, this is the most response I’ve seen to a book after this long a hiatus in … ever, really. It seems like the book has moved in real time (or close to it, anyway), as Hazel says it’s been three years since her father’s death. I wish I had the time to have reread at least the last arc again, if not the entire series before this, but I think the book did a good job of getting you back to a place where it all makes sense, even if you’re lapsed or new.
Mark: Personally, I re-read the whole thing in the last few months when the comic’s return started creeping up on me. It’s 54 issues, but it reads very well in trade (and a significant amount, if not a majority of its readership, read it in that format). And the age thing: Issue #1 was March of 2012, and Hazel is now 10, so it really is passing just about in real time.
But as you said, this issue does a good job of easing you back into things. Everyone remembers that Marko died in #54, so referring back to it in the first few pages of the issue grounds it for people who haven’t touched the old issues in years. And then it slowly introduces some of the other major events of #54, namely reminding us that The Will also killed Prince Robot, orphaning Squire. There are a few major characters who are still alive after #54 whose fates we don’t know about (chief among them Petrichor and Ghüs), but if the first half of Saga is any indication, they’ll be showing up again in some form or another.
But here we are now in 2022. Do you think the comics market has shifted since Saga started? Has the amount of sex and violence that Saga portrays on page become passé? Has the shock value lessened in the intervening years?
Matt: Yeah, I’m a floppy reader from issue #1, so digging out all those singles? That’s a feat I wasn’t able to take on.
Maybe I’m reading the wrong comics, but this was considerably more graphic than pretty much anything else I read on a regular basis, at least when it comes to sex. American comics are, of course, historically puritanical in the mainstream. The violence here is fairly intense, but not anything I wouldn’t see in any book that is a T+ or whatever your basic PG-13 rating analog is. But as Saga goes? Nothing I wouldn’t have expected from this book. Not passé, but within what you expect from a book briefly censored by Comixology.
I will say the thing that Staples and Vaughan (and boy, it’s weird to break that common convention of putting writer first, but that’s how they put it so I will, too) do is they make it very non-exploitative. Alana using her breasts to grab attention to sell baby formula and maybe “baby formula”? In character. The scene with The Will and Gwendolyn is direct, sexual, but not touching on porn. Frankly, the suicide bombing is the most visceral piece, and as I said, isn’t more violent than what you’d see elsewhere, it’s just handled in a way that makes it intense from context.
Mark: The suicide bombing was pretty intense, and one thing I’ve learned since my initial read of this series is that Blue is not just an invented Romance language, it’s specifically the invented Romance language Esperanto. Luckily for us, Google Translate includes Esperanto, and so if you plug in the suicide bomber’s dialogue before she kills herself, it reveals that her children were killed by the Landfallians, and that she only feels empty now. It’s also implied that she likely removed her horns to get close enough to the soldiers to detonate her bomb vest. It’s pretty upsetting stuff.
Matt: I had no idea that was Esperanto! Fascinating. I was very curious about the horns and whether that was self-mutilation, and now you have answered my question.
Mark: She doesn’t say it directly, but it allows her to keep a hood over her forehead, disguising herself as a non-Wreather, so that’s my theory about it.
Matt: Makes perfect sense. As we’re going to be diving into character with the rest of this, let’s very specifically call out art here.
Another thing that has not changed is that Fiona Staples is incredible. Aside from the sex and violence, my god there are some gorgeous spreads here. The page of Hazel taking flight? Poster-worthy. And nobody does character/ship design work like her. Whether it’s Bombazine, the friendly, one-armed, cargo-shorts wearing, drug-running Koala man (No one can replace Ghüs in my heart, but this guy? This guy rules), or the perplexingly alien Doctor Xo, or the two-page spread of the pirate ship, this book is still breathtaking.
Mark: I could imagine a world where another writer takes over based on Vaughan’s notes, Wheel of Time-style, but not with another artist.
Through Hazel(’s) Eyes
Matt: So, do we have any idea how old narrator Hazel is? Do we feel like we’re creeping closer to her present, or do we still have quite some time to go?
Mark: It’s a good question. We know so very little about who Hazel the narrator is as a character. We get her opinions about the story she’s telling. She seems to be imparting some wisdom, speaking of things as if they’re universal truths that she’s learned over a long life. But a) Young people are apt to spout some utter bullshit as universal truths and b) She’s been living a hard life, and that can age a person pretty fast, spiritually speaking.
Matt: That’s where my thoughts are going. There’s an air of wisdom to what Hazel is saying, sure, but I’m not seeing a ton of difference in her speech patterns between narrator Hazel and 10-year-old Hazel. She’s pretty casually dropping f-bombs in front of her mom, not that Alana can talk.
The thing I found most interesting about Hazel in this issue is the fact that she ignored her mother’s rules and endangered herself to steal an album. This makes me think of how Alana’s life was changed by the works of D. Oswald Heist. The power of art is part of Saga, so I’m curious if we’re going to see more of Hazel and music as a recurring motif.
Mark: You’d think for a kid who’s lived on the run for her whole life, who’s lost a parent, escaped from a refugee camp and all, that she wouldn’t be reckless enough to take a risk like that for an album. But she’s a kid, after all. She’s testing her boundaries and probably thinks she knows how better to get away with things because of this little adventure. But I think we’re seeing something of a transition in this comic: The story has mostly been about Marko and Alanna up to this point, but now that Hazel has begun to assert herself more, we’ll be seeing the focus shift much more onto her. Because at the end of the day, the comic is Hazel’s story, not Marko’s, not Alanna’s. It was a comic about parenting, but it’s becoming a comic about being young. As Hazel puts it in the issue, “in this moment, you began to understand that the universe no longer belonged to the generation who raised you.”
Matt: Sounds like you think this will become the Hazel and Squire show pretty soon?
Mark: Man, I hope Squire survives long enough for that to happen!
Matt: Most comics, I’d be like, “There’s no way they’d heap more suffering on or just kill the little guy.” But this is Saga. There’s never too much suffering.
Mark: I’m quitting if they kill Ghüs. [Grote’s note: So say we all.]
A Tryst to the Moon
Matt: As stated earlier, it’s been three years since Marko’s death. Seems like The Will took his damn sweet time getting to Wreath with Marko’s severed, skeletonized head, huh?
Mark: Well, he says he was on Alana’s and Hazel’s trail until it got cold, so I’m assuming that much of that time was hot pursuit. But I’d like to touch on the scene you mentioned earlier. Staples and Vaughan have spent a lot of time humanizing the villains of this comic. I would have hesitated to call Gwendolyn and The Will outright villains before this. Even though the last thing we saw The Will do was kill Marko, he was also at the absolute lowest point we’d seen him be so far: He’d had his license revoked, he was in withdrawal from fadeaway, he had just escaped imprisonment and torture at the hands of Ianthe.
Here, he shows up with the skull of our beloved Marko, and this gets Gwendolyn so horny (Pun intended, I guess?) that they immediately have sex in front of it, right outside the Wreath High Command building. I’m not thrown by the explicitness of the scene (This is Saga, after all), but it just seems like these two characters have become cartoonish in their villainy. What’d you think?
Matt: Oh, definitely! I wonder what these three years have done to them. While we have a general sense of what the command and political structures of Wreath and Landfall are, it seems like with her ascension, Gwendolyn has entered a whole new echelon here, and to quote that overused-in-comics maxim, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I figure we’ll find out what she had to do to get here, and even the thing that has shown some “humanity” (in quotes as none of these characters are by definition human) in her, her caring for the orphan Sophie, is brushed aside pretty quickly here.
I love the final panel of this sequence and the, as you alluded to, placement of Marko’s skull. Man, that hurts.
Mark: Memento mori! Or memoru morton if you speak Blue.
Saga, Etc.
- Hey, if drug smuggling is good enough for Han Solo, it’s good enough for Alana.
- Those fire cops are 🔥🔥🔥.
- It looks like next month is going to be a Squire-focused issue. At least that’s what the cover implies.
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of five. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the creator interview podcast WMQ&A with Dan Grote.
