Saga, Book Three (2019) by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

5/10

Which covers volumes 7-9, or issues 37–54.

Boy oh boy what a disappointment. I must be the only person on the planet who isn’t in love with this comic. The first volumes were great, but after that it has been a steady downward spiral of slight disappointment for me, and now its about to crash into the ground. Am I the one who is crazy? I’m getting tired of how this comic does things; of its constant need to be edgy, of its focus on sex and cringe teenage dialogue, of its lack of story and its blunt insertion of contemporary politics with all its current lingo. If there was a story it would take me out of it. 

In the first book I wondered if Vaughan would do anything with the fact that he puts two cultures against each other where one is modelled on a contemporary USA culture and one on fairy tale logic, and I wondered what he would do with the galactic war. The answer to both questions is nothing. 1400 pages in and it is all just background for the family drama. Ok, so I may have had the wrong expectations.

For the first parts of this book, Vaughan decided that he wanted to write a western instead. So Marko, Alana and the rest fly to the Planet of Westerns, which is full of stone arches and rednecks with thick accents, and they don cowboy hats for a heavy-handed abortion storyline. A galaxy far far away and a character talks about being “pro-life”. Using current political speak like that just completely destroys my immersion. A full third of this book is filled with hearing everyone’s opinion on abortion. The story isn’t even properly set up for a sci-fi treatment of this theme, as Alana’s case is about a medical emergency. In any case, the comic turned very preachy, locations were uninspired and all fun had disappeared. 

Besides that, one of the characters (Isabel) was unceremoniously killed off and nobody talks about her again, and she’s replaced by this annoying and confrontational character Petrichor. That’s how emotions are processed in this story: constant edgy quibbling between immature characters and nobody talks about people that die along the way, because shock is more important than psychological consequences. I still haven’t seen Alana being happy that they got their daughter back after all those years, because Petrichor was pushed to the front in those scenes. Petrichor’s only defining characteristics are that she’s transsexual and always angry. She is put into the story for that reason, and I see that Vaughan thought that that is more important than literally the emotional conclusion of a major storyline. The story seems in service of all these Important Issues, and random moments of sex and shock of course, and skips over emotional processing. 

I don’t think this is a good way to tell a story. It feels in love with certain trends in comics that are applied as if by rote, instead of understanding the emotional beats of a story.

Maybe one reason I’m not feeling all the feelings everyone else seems to be feeling is that there is a rhythm to Vaughan’s writing, where every time things seem to be going well, something bad will happen. No character is allowed an arc of self-actualisation. It becomes predictable and in time it grinds down all the storylines. And once you stop reacting emotionally to all that and the sex stuff starts to feel random and manipulative, then the characters begin to annoy and the preachiness and writing and pop culture references and the structure of the story too, and then there’s not much left to appreciate. 

Is there nothing good to be said about this? Well, if you enjoyed the previous volumes and found no problems with anything, then the odds are that you will love these volumes as well. The art is still great. The book has a pretty good ending, even if it is a downer, which I’m sure will be subverted again in the next volume. It was good in the sense that it brings a renewed focus to the story by bringing a number of plot lines together. But I think this comic might not be for me. I had the same problems with Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls, so I think his writing just rubs me the wrong way.

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