Saga is finally coming back, thank god
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' vulgar, beautiful, hilarious sci-fi story has been gone from comic shelves since 2018
Aux News SaGa
It’s been more than three years since Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples announced that a) they’d hit the half-way point on their hilarious, violent, ever-changing Image comic series Saga, and, b) they were putting the series on hold for the foreseeable future—albeit not before killing one more beloved character, because that’s just how Saga rolls.
Well, the foreseeable future is finally here, as Vaughan and Staples announced at New York Comic-Con today that “Compendium Two” of their sci-fi epic is finally in the works. Per Polygon, specifics aren’t available on an official return date as of yet, but the series is expected to be back in comic stores some time in 2022.
Saga, for the unenlightened, tells the story of Alana and Marko, two soldiers from warring worlds who surprise themselves, and everybody else, by falling madly in love with each other, despite their incompatible ideologies, biologies, etc. The series is narrated by the pair’s daughter Hazel from some distant-future point, telling a sprawling story of bounty hunters, family bonding, and a lot of dudes with TV screens for heads. Along the way, it hit a balance of tenderness, gore, and humor that will be familiar to fans of Vaughan’s work—popping up most recently on Amazon’s adaptation of his long-running superhero comic Invincible.
Here’s Oliver Sawa, reviewing an installment of the series from 2014:
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples like to begin issues of Saga with a full-page image that aims to elicits a strong, specific reaction, and they really outdo themselves for the start of their newest story arc. Behind that hazy, theatrical cover of Alana in a costume, picking a wedgie on the Open Circuit set that is her current workplace, waits a full-page close-up of a gray robot vagina pushing out a small television-headed baby, accompanied by text of a doctor yelling, “One last push!” The visual that high school health students have averted their eyes from for years is plastered on the first page of one of the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful creator-owned series of the past decade, and that fearlessness is a huge part of why Saga has achieved such a high level of acclaim in just over two years.
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Along the way, it hit a balance of tenderness, gore, and humor that will
be familiar to fans of Vaughan’s work—popping up most recently on Amazon’s adaptation of his long-running superhero comic
Vaughn had nothing to do with Invincible. Are you thinking of Y: The Last Man?
Vaughan has nothing to do with Invincible. He did co-create a comic that recently became a TV show, but I’m not gonna do all the work for you, Hughes.
Ironically the correct answer is the very first words in the Polygon article he references.
And if he’d looked at the very last words he’d know the publication date of the next issue.
As an aside, you might want to hit the dismiss button on Syafiqjabar of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to treat black and LGBT people as props in his Quixotic quest to fram Zach Snyder as a White Savior…He’s under the idea that stanning a clueless white director as some sort of White Savior is praxis rather than an unhealthy parasocial relationship.
It would be nice if the first person to comment on an article just copy/pasted whatever source the AV Club is trying to regurgitate.
I would offer to do it myself, but I’m just a filthy grey.
So…. what websites are better for comic books related news? Because that’s a horrendous error.
I’m not sure there is a great comics site. CBR used to be, but it’s now a joke. Far too many of them have shifted focus to movies, tv, etc.
“I’m not gonna do all the work for you, Hughes.”
-The A.V. Club
This website’s reporting have not been very good ever since most of its good writers went and formed their own site (that is is sadly dead now).
and a lesser but still glaring mistake: “incompatible ideologies, biologies, etc.”Ah yes, the “incompatible” biologies that not only allow Alana and Marko to fuck, but get pregnant, carry a child to term and give birth to it with seemingly no adverse effects.
Yeah, agreed. In fact, considering some of the other couples in Saga, Alana and Marko seem fairly biologically similar. At least they have the same number of legs.
It’s such a colossal blunder that I wonder whether it’s in there just to drive comments. How could even the most incompetent writer just pull that from the ether? …oh wait. AVClub
Still not corrected a day later.
Yeah, when I read that I thought I was the one who was confused, but I guess it was Hughes.
This guy sucks major balls and it’s not even funny. He must be somebody’s nephew.
The latest in a flood of biographical collections of Golden and Silver Age comic-book artists, Genius, Isolated: The Life And Art Of Brian K. Vaughan (IDW) is easily the classiest of the group. It’s not only that the book is handsome, beautifully designed, and lengthy, with lots of rarities (including the terrific “Jon Fury” material Vaughan produced in the service). Nor is it that it’s much better written than most such works, by tested comics researchers Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell. It’s that Vaughan himself is an incredibly fascinating figure. Even if he were only known for his comics work, he’d be considered one of the greats. Genius, Isolated presents enough material showing his brilliance at action drawing and character design to firmly make the case that he deserves the deluxe biographical treatment. But Vaughan was also a fascinating person, an outspoken critic and defender of the comics medium, a pioneering animator, and a great cartoonist. He’s one of the great characters of the medium, as well as one of its best practitioners, and a worthy subject for this essential biography… A
Per , specifics aren’t available on an official return date as of yet, but the series is expected to be back in comic stores some time in 2022.The Polygon article is specific: “Saga #55 will be an extra-long issue — 44 pages
rather than the usual 22 — for the same price. The book will hit shelves
on Jan. 26, 2022.”
“In classic Saga style, despite knowing the series would be on pause for years, Saga #54 still ended with a sudden and devastating character death.”Despite?Are you unfamiliar with the concept of the cliffhanger?
Oh god, now I’m just thinking about that last issue….
That hit me like a freight train. I remember just staring at that final panel in shock, and it’s not too often a piece of fiction does that to me.
I’m still traumatized.
It’s thing like this that make me wish I enjoyed reading comics.
I barely cry at fiction. Like, it takes a lot to even get me misty-eyed but that final panel had me choking back sobs.
I think the last issue is still in the freezer where I left it in 2018.
I’d heard that they’d taken a break at what they intended to be the halfway mark of the story, but by this point I assumed that they’d said ‘fuck it, we’re out of ideas’ like so many comic creators have before.It just seems like there are a lot of comics that just sort of…end…in the middle of the narrative, and I figured this would be the same. Even though it ran a lot longer than a lot of titles seem to.
False advertising, AV Club! I thought the Canadian band behind “On the Loose” was reuniting!
Preparation Heche surprisingly did not do their preparation for this article!
They still did more than Hughes.
This is pretty much the only modern comic book series I follow now. Glad to see it’s back.
How’s being banned from Gizmodo treating you?
When did that happen? I can still post there, just in the greys but I’m only not greyed out on AV Club.
despite their incompatible ideologies, biologies, etc. The series is narrated by the pair’s daughter Hazel from some distant-future pointFor someone who’s heard of the series but knows nothing else about it, I find these two statements being adjacent to each other quite funny.
While they are literally from two different worlds, the “incompatible” aspects of their biologies are not related to the bits required for producing a kid. The interspecies biology of the galaxy seems pretty forgiving as a rule, though it doesn’t always extend to the creation of children.
“Incompatible” isn’t really an accurate description anyway, but this is the same article that claims the return date is unspecified (it is not) and that BKV was somehow involved with Invincible (he was not).
Yeah, they’re not really “incompatible” so much as “slightly different.” They’re both humanoid but he and his people have horns and she and her people have wings. Other than that, they’re pretty similar. Don’t let this not great article put you off the series, though. It’s fantastic.
Invincible was created by and written by Robert Kirkman, the creator and writer of The Walking Dead. The comic book series by Vaughn that is currently being adapted into a television series is Y: The Last Man.Please do 30 seconds of research before you publish your articles.
He knows, https://www.avclub.com/new-teaser-tries-to-trick-us-into-believing-the-y-the-1847303295
Um, #AVClub, don’t how this article was researched, but what was reported is oddly lacking in specifics, detail and all around ACTUAL, correct information. Tilda, even written that herb in charge, are STILL better than this.
God, I love this series so much. The biggest problem I’ve had with so much sci-fi is that the characters don’t feel like real people, of the type that you could imagine sharing a meal or a long conversation with. But the cast of ‘Saga’ are (often painfully) real, and feel like they have a lot more going on than just the needs of the plot.
Which is kind of why all the deaths wind up hitting you like a freight train. (Not that I don’t love the series. I adore it. But, oh man.)
Let’s be real though…Saga is a straight up fantasy story, and is only “science fiction” by the most expansive definition of the term.
Holy shit. Did you really just attribute Invincible to Brian Vaughan? I know that newswires have been making major factual errors on this site for the last few years, but to me this feels like a depressing new low.
I just hope they are not going to do the old release schedule of 6 months of books and then a 6 month break. At that rate it won’t end for almost another decade
It was 6 months on, 3 months off. They did 54 issues in 6 years, which maths out perfectly. So, another 6 years to wrap up. I’m cool with that.
Can’t believe there’s zero mention of the new show Sandman, also based on a comic written by Vaughan. Just absolutely sloppy writing.
laugh emoji cry emoji
I’m amazed that this hasn’t been made into a TV show or a movie or something yet. It’s basically R-rated Star Wars.
I think they both said, right from the start, that they where going Bill Watterson and never going to sell the rights – they wanted to make a story that was only for the comic form. Let’s see….
Thank god indeed. There have been a lot of great series I’ve gotten into in the intervening years, but boy have I missed Saga.
So… is there just zero editorial oversight in the kinjaverse anymore? Anyone at all to talk to you and say “hey, dude, doing lazy-ass garbage like not bothering to read your sources and getting basic facts wrong is not, in fact, okay”? Is it like a bunch of high school seniors in mid-May over there, knowing the end is near and just killing time until the boot falls and the herbs do what we all suspect and finally shutter this shit once and for all? Could you have just posted, like, a recipe or a poem or a rickroll for this assignment with equal lack of correction or repercussion?