Quite A Pair: Saga #7 Review

Saga, by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples, is awesome. It is a space opera on a massive scale, spanning planets, including interstellar war, magic, technology, and strange races of aliens, from the primary warring races of ram-horned magic users and their pixie-winged opponents, to the charming triclopsed giant with man-tits and a scrotum that looks like it’s where the testicles of steroid-users go when they die, who we meet in Saga #7.

It has enough good guys, bad guys, androids and bounty hunters to populate ten Star Wars movies, with enough foul language and robot-fucking to make Disney put away its checkbook in gagging horror. And it does it with the kind of special effects budget you can only get with a pen and paper.

And yet, that is not what makes Saga awesome. It is awesome because, while this massive conflict is happening, this is not a story about those things, but one that happens during them, or perhaps in spite of them. Despite the aliens and robots and magic and technology, this is a human story, and Saga #7 is a perfect example of that. This issue contains magic and starships and the Scrotum That Ate Pittsburgh, but it is about a couple visiting their in-laws for the first time, when those in-laws don’t approve of the relationship. And as a guy who has been in situations where his girlfriend’s parents have treated him in a way ranging from aloof politeness to barely-restrained contempt, it is damn effective.

Plus, it has that splash page that I Goddamned guarantee you was shipped back to Staples with a note from Vaughan reading: “More scrote.”

The first issue of Saga’s Volume 2, Saga #7 opens with Marko, Alana and Marko’s parents, who have hunted Marko and Alana down after Marko went missing, and who have banished their dead babysitter, Izabel, to the nearest space rock. Marko and his mom dash off to retrieve Izabel and to bicker back and forth over the eternal question of the universe: whether the wife is worthy of her darling baby boy, and whether he is pissing his life away over the wrong woman. As often happens in a space opera. In the meantime, Marko’s dad remains back at the rocketship with Alana, making chit-chat over whose race committed the worse war crimes against the other, and asking whether Alana’s and Marko’s child is cute as a button or an abomination of miscegenation. Which means that this issue is a rocketship, a magic spell and a ray gun away from being an eerie match to my experiences at a delightful Yom Kippur dinner in 1999.

And it’s that relatability that makes Saga in general so good, and this issue in particular simply excellent. Vaughan is doing his share of big sci-fi worldbuilding here; the specific references to battles, the technology and the rules behind the use of magic clearly show that he has put a great deal of thought into this universe, but unlike many people with ambitions to write epic space opera, he doesn’t let worldbuilding be an excuse to crawl up his own ass. This issue is about a couple visiting with disapproving in-laws, which any human being of moral dating age can relate to.

Despite the fantastic elements happening in this story, there’s nothing here that can’t be related back to normal, human experience. Hell, even the scene with Scrotor The Mighty (my name, not Vaughan’s! Which means I own it! And all the subsidiary rights!) caused me to call back to times I’ve watched movies with my folks that happened to include frontal nudity – Marko’s utterance of, “I promise you don’t want to see… Mother, please,” takes the fantastic appearance of a giant, ties it to the discomfort of dealing with anything sexual with your parents around, and makes it something that anyone can empathize with. It is a masterful mixing of the mundane and the fantastic, and it carries through everything in the issue.

Staples’s art continues to be exemplary for this book, to the point where I’m not sure I can imagine anyone else drawing it. In this issue, as in all issues of Saga, she has to present the utterly fantastic in a way that is still human and emotional – let’s remember, there is one panel in this entire issue that depicts a regular old human being – and she accomplishes it completely. This is a book that includes no recognizable people, and more than one utterly fantastic and / or grotesque monstrosity, and she keeps everything grounded with extremely expressive faces and realistic figures (at least when it comes to the humanoids; if Scrotor The Mighty is realistic of any kind of real condition, allow this review to serve as my Do Not Resuscitate order). Her panel layout is extremely simple and easy to follow, and the somewhat painted-looking colors give everything a warmth and depth. This is good-looking stuff.

Saga #7 is yet another issue in a comic story that mixes the utterly fantastic with the completely mundane. There is enough weird, alien shit here to make the Mos Eisley Cantina look like a Skinhead / Klan bar, and yet the characters’ predicaments are so thoroughly pedestrian, in the sense that we have all been through a magicless version of it, that you can’t help but feel compelling empathy for every damn one of them. It is a killer issue of what has become one of the best sci-fi comics I’ve ever read.

And if nothing else, seeing Scrotor makes me feel good about me.