Comic Book Review: Saga #20

Saga issue 20 review by Joe David Thompson

Image Comics is having quite the year.

Out of all the books I picked up this week, my favorite by far is the latest issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga.  Now into it's twentieth issue, Saga has been a book I've loved since page one of issue one.  It transplants the basic idea behind Romeo and Juliet to science fiction setting, turning the fueding families into warring factions.  In Saga, Alana and Marko are dealing with the strains this places on their marriage, all the while running from the authoritues and trying to keep their newborn daughter, Hazel, also the narrator of the comic, safe.

Vaughn is in prime form on Saga, using the story mechanisms of a struggling marriage and the perils of war to ask bigger questions about the culture around us.  Issue twenty deals in an emotional way with how art inspires its audience to take a stand or change the world.  Vaughan seems to draw attention to how our quick paced world has reduced activism to tweeting a hashtag or sharing a Facebook status rather than taking action.  All this is packed into the confines of how Alana and Marko are growing apart, with Vaughan's characteristic dark humor and often explicit plot turns.  Fiona Staples' art gets more beautiful with each issue, and is not something to be missed.  That she accomplishes such striking images digitally is a thing to marvel upon.

As a side note, Vaughan also has a "pay what you can" project, the strictly digital comic The Private Eye available at: http://panelsyndicate.com.  If you love Saga, you'll love this.  

Are you a Saga fan?  Sound off below with your thoughts and theories!

Joe David Thompson has been doing media reviews for websites such as Red Carpet Crash and the 405 Music Blog. For any questions or comments for Joe David Thompson, you can email him at jovid52@me.com and follow him on twitter @jovid52