Or it might just be Lying Cat

November 11, 2015 10:43 PM

"Here’s the point: to all of us readers, Saga gives a promise of freedom to be whoever we want and make our own choices without fear of being judged or punished." -- Nadia Bauman looks at what exactly it is that makes Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan's Saga so popular.
posted by MartinWisse (45 comments total)

I agree with the author's thesis....it seems that every decade gets a sci-fi universe that fits into and also advances the zeitgeist..... the idealistic 60s had the cosmopolitan Star Trek, the 70s had the auteur baby boomer nostalgia of Star Wars, the 80s had the dual technophobias of the Terminator and Aliens universes, the 00s had the solipsism of the Matrix universe.

Now we're preoccupied with diversity and body acceptance, and worried about irreconcilable civilization clash. And thus, Saga.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:23 AM on November 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

LeRoienJaune: What did the 90's have?
posted by BiggerJ at 12:35 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Who got to have The Next Generation? That was dope.
posted by grobstein at 12:46 AM on November 12, 2015

90s had the end times of the X-Files
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:35 AM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Star Wars: 1977. 1980, 1983
Alien(s): 1979, 1986
Terminator: 1984, 1991
The Matrix: 1999, 2003

The first Star Wars trilogy, Terminator, and Alien are contemporaneous.
posted by ardgedee at 3:45 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

MRRN....
posted by Public Corruption? at 4:32 AM on November 12, 2015

My college years were from 1992 - 1996, and I remember that my contemporary sci-fi diet was a solid mix of cyberpunk (Snow Crash, Hackers, all of the Gibson that I read in high school) and an expected mix of space station sci-fi: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. I feel like the first Matrix belongs to the 90s, and is this apex of the cyberpunk aesthetic, but what the Matrix franchise became with its surveillance state paranoia is part of the 00's.

But if I had to project certain American ideas and anxieties into DS9 and Babylon 5, it's probably reflective of how the 90s was this mix of "golly, wow, it IS a new world now that the Cold War is over, and half the world isn't scary, let's globalize and meet all of these foreigners who have their own particular agendas, and figure out our place in it." and "Shit, we've got all this power and influence now, having won, what do we do with all of this responsibility?"

So, yeah, I love Saga, and I think that the essay is spot on in analyzing the appeal, but I'd hesitate to identify one franchise that tries to speak for an entire generation's zeitgeist. Our societies are complex and capable of supporting multiple intersecting waves of change. While Saga is certainly popular, it's worth remembering the 2010s as the decade when movie theaters were dominated by superhero (who are whipsmart, all powerful ubermenschen that solve complicated geopolitical problems with punching) and zombie films (fear of disease, fear of environment, fear of others) and that each of these speak to other anxieties about our times that we wrestle with in addition to war, diversity, and changing family models.
posted by bl1nk at 4:44 AM on November 12, 2015 [10 favorites]

I feel like the 90s was the age of all-you-can-eat TV sci-fi: Babylon 5, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, X Files, early Farscape, Sliders (shut up I loved it), Quantum Leap, Space: Above and Beyond, Outer Limits, Third Rock from the Sun and Red Dwarf and whichever other one I am going to remember ten minutes after hitting 'Post Comment' and feel like a traitor about because I was a geeky teenager at the time and watched hours and hours of these every week and now I am forgetting good ones while remembering Voyager.

But, this quite possibly has more to do with me and who/where I was at the time than any objectively valid statement about 90s sci-fi zeitgeist, because I have always loved getting to fully immerse myself in the kind of fictional universe where there's just lots and lots and lots and lots of ongoing canon to immerse yourself in. For the same reason, Saga came along at just the right time in my life, at home with a young baby and spending a lot of time being introspective about my own sense of self - and lo, there's a hugely immersive ongoing sci-fi series, and it's in in comic rather than TV form so I can read it at my leisure, and it's adult and interesting and funny and cliffhanger-y and one of the heroes on the first front cover is breastfeeding a baby. It was like they'd written it just for me!
posted by Catseye at 5:42 AM on November 12, 2015

how the 90s was this mix of "golly, wow, it IS a new world now that the Cold War is over, and half the world isn't scary, let's globalize and meet all of these foreigners who have their own particular agendas, and figure out our place in it." and "Shit, we've got all this power and influence now, having won, what do we do with all of this responsibility?"

I was thinking of this in terms of the last season of Babylon 5, where the big two wars have been won and... now it turns out there's a whole messy landscape of a thousand little conflicts and consequences to deal with, none of which can be resolved easily with a fleet of big spaceships and a dramatic speech. But, I think an even better example might be what the Star Wars franchise became in the 90s: the Extended Universe of novels on how you deal with the bad guys once you've done the big showdown on the death star, but surprise, it turns out that the Empire doesn't just vanish but instead fragments and changes and becomes a whole lot more complicated to fight.

The 90s, in which we learned that Fighting The Bad Guys doesn't wrap up with the season finale...
posted by Catseye at 5:53 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I love how organic it is. staples doesn't like drawing traditional sci-fi style hardware so she just doesn't draw sci-fi style hardware, and the result is a really unique look and feel.
posted by Artw at 6:20 AM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'd hesitate to pin Saga down as this generation's anything given that the story is unfinished, but this was a good analysis.

what exactly it is that makes Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan's Saga so popular

Placing the artist's name ahead of the author's is telling. The artwork is so damn beautiful and inventive. That is what carries me through the saga of Saga. I absolutely have to see her latest artwork each month.
posted by GrapeApiary at 6:22 AM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

I kinda bounced off this comic, will have to try again. I do really like the art.

If you had told me in the 90s that I would read almost exclusively Image Comics by 2015 I would have laughed you out of the room. And yet here we are.
posted by selfnoise at 6:23 AM on November 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

Image Comics

I'm not a comics reader, so the only things I'm looking forward to are Rutabaga Vol 2 and more Rat Queens.. and sure enough, RQ is Image.

Might have to check out Saga finally, though.
posted by curious nu at 6:36 AM on November 12, 2015

This is a great analysis, and also contains a lot of wisdom about what I like best about other new fresh fiction that isn't epic fantasy, like Master of None, the Wire, or Upstream Color.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:39 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Placing the artist's name ahead of the author's is telling. The artwork is so damn beautiful and inventive. That is what carries me through the saga of Saga. I absolutely have to see her latest artwork each month.

Exactly. The storyline is well-written, and I have enjoyed it all so far. But the artwork is great. It is the better of the two elements, for sure.
posted by das_2099 at 6:42 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm probably some issues behind on Saga now, but it's literally the only actual comic book I'm following. It's not perfect, but it is really, really good. (Also, yes, Lying Cat.)

I'm not opposed to, say, superhero stuff in principle (I've been somewhere between "I enjoyed that ok" and "that was really fucking good" on most of the MCU movies, for instance), but I sure do prefer the kind of thing that Saga seems to be.

Comicspeople, is there anything else out there that, based on these sparse observations, you would suspect that I would enjoy as much?
posted by brennen at 6:45 AM on November 12, 2015

Yeah, i read every issue but not because I'm that into the story. I like Brian K. Vaughn, but the world is so rich and the story moves so quickly. There's hardly any time to really immerse in the world. It's really the artwork that has me repeatedly opening up my old issues and flipping through.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:46 AM on November 12, 2015

Maybe Saga represents one part of the zeitgeist and Walking Dead the other. I love Saga, it's beautiful and will hopefully go somewhere amazing. I think it can be in danger of loving its own cleverness a little but the creators are having such a good time it doesn't matter.

Walking Dead I can't watch, partly because I hate gore but also because I already spend too much time despairing over all the problems we have that we could solve if we weren't such irredeemable assholes. Zombies or climate change or poverty, it doesn't matter; we seem doomed to choosing to be assholes and fucking ourselves over.
posted by emjaybee at 6:59 AM on November 12, 2015

What did the 90's have?

The word "cyberspace" mean anything?

Gibson wrote the Sprawl books between '84 and '88, Burning Chrome in '86. The dystopic corporate virtual realities that defined the imaginings of many 80's kids (and 90's young adults) lasted from the late 80s through to the time the web got started, in the mid-nineties. Books often precede culture, movies frequently lag it. The Matrix trilogy in the late 90's is the book end.
posted by bonehead at 7:09 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

If anything, Saga is probably laying the groundwork for the zeitgeist of the 20s. No matter how much we love it online, no matter how many people I give Volume One to for birthdays and Christmas presents, the number of people reading Saga is still going to be a fraction of the people who go see Force Awakens. On opening night, even.

But as Bonehead notes, books (and comic books) tend to precede film and TV by half a dozen years or so. We're unlikely to get a tv or film version of Saga (neither Staples or Vaughn are interested, and also how could you do it right; on the other hand, GRRM said the same thing fifteen years ago about ASOIAF), but folks influenced by it will be making some awesome stuff with the same ideals at its heart.
posted by thecaddy at 7:33 AM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

I just want to be friends with Izabel.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:41 AM on November 12, 2015

One of the best things about Saga for me is the letters page. It feels like a bunch of people finding a good home. Even if the book turned to crap I think I would still pick it up for the happiness I get from hearing people call in from all over.
posted by yerfatma at 7:46 AM on November 12, 2015

Staples can draw a woman with a giant bat nose and have her look like a cute nextdoor neighbor. This is nontrivial.
posted by benzenedream at 8:21 AM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think that Brian K. Vaughn tends to suffer from Whedon Syndrome: people who like his stuff really, really like it, and tend to overpromote it, which results in people who might otherwise appreciate it being disappointed that it wasn't the life-changing experience it had been promoted as. Saga is a fine book, but "obvious, ultimate, universal, indisputable public acclamation" is not even close, even given a bit of ironic exaggeration on the part of the reviewer.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:21 AM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's the art. I like the story and all, but the appeal of Saga is the art, full stop.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:05 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

A.) the real answer is in the title of the post.

B.) no but seriously, folks, the bulk of the heavy lifting is done by Staples' art. A personal example: when I was a kid I used to pester my parents to buy Archie Comics for me from the little holders in the grocery store checkout lane. I strongly associate that brand with childhood and it doesn't matter how much I hear about the reboots or how there's some good Archie stuff now, it's forever fixed in my mind as something for kids only. Well, that was true until I heard Staples was illustrating Archie #1 - I bought that up immediately. She (and her artwork) are a treasure. I was especially taken with her treatment of Jughead - she keeps him as skinny and angular as he ought to be but now he's imbued with some sort of Hiddleston-ian handsomeness. Non-traditional sexy non-muscular Jughead. That's not even possible! and yet there it is.

So yeah. Staples. I've read plenty of other stuff by Vaughan and I liked it, but Staples' art is what dragged me into Saga and kept me there.
posted by komara at 9:37 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Comicspeople, is there anything else out there that, based on these sparse observations, you would suspect that I would enjoy as much?

I'm fairly comic-ky, without being any sort of expert, and I tend to like superhero stuff a lot less than stuff that entertains me in roughly the sort of way that Saga does. So maybe I can try to make recommendations for you.

I think Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones stands up to the test of time pretty well, for sci-fi world building and character driven adventure. The other thing that I like in roughly that vein is Transmetropolitan, more for the world-building than the story and characters though (in some ways I think this has aged less well, despite being considerably more recent - some of the (late 90s) era's blasé attitude about identity politics feels quite uncomfortable to me now). I think DMZ might work for you, as well, although I think I only read the first couple of trade paperback volumes, and must admit to not remembering it that well. I think it's potentially worth checking out though.
posted by howfar at 9:41 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

But, yes, the reason that Saga is fantastic is Fiona Staples. Her worldbuilding work on Saga is some of the best I've ever seen by any author or team working in any medium.
posted by howfar at 9:43 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have to admit, my reaction to Saga has been:

Volume I -- This is amazing!
Volume II -- Great stuff!
Volume III -- OK, interesting. Still with ya.
Volume IV -- I'm ... going to have to hold on to see where this is going ...
Volume V -- WTF. Nope, sorry, I'm done.
posted by kyrademon at 10:24 AM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think Staples makes it work. Just on a lark I picked up the BKV We Stand On Guard and ended up noping out of it after three issues. It felt too much like bad Heavy Metal dystopia and not in a good way.

I will admit that Saga feels in a bit of a slump after the big reveal about the novel.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:59 AM on November 12, 2015

Cave of Happy Sighs tho.
posted by Artw at 11:19 AM on November 12, 2015

When I heard about one of Staples' other projects I challenged my wife to guess the series telling her that it is the least likely of all comics for Fiona Staples to be working on. She got Archie on the second guess. I really need to pick up those issues...
posted by stet at 11:46 AM on November 12, 2015

Clarification: Heavy Metal the magazine, not music or chemistry. Maybe it was rolling my eyes at the shower scene that did it for me.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:18 PM on November 12, 2015

I was wondering about the spider and then saw it and was all "oh, no surprise there, it is more like a lady centaur with some extra eyes and a dress on." I was hoping it would look more like a real spider.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:44 PM on November 12, 2015

I was wondering about the spider and then saw it and was all "oh, no surprise there, it is more like a lady centaur with some extra eyes and a dress on." I was hoping it would look more like a real spider.

I think it depends on the panel.
posted by howfar at 1:55 PM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Honesty Cat
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:04 PM on November 12, 2015

"Comicspeople, is there anything else out there that, based on these sparse observations, you would suspect that I would enjoy as much?"

I'd say give Pretty Deadly a try. Beautiful colors by Jordie Bellaire, fantastic art by Emma Ríos, and a story by Kelly Sue DeConnick that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. I'm not going to say it's groundbreaking like Saga is, but it might scratch some of the same itch for non-heroes-in-pajamas that are on a quest of sorts.

Or just go read Rat Queens if you like things that are Fun.
posted by komara at 2:41 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think one of my favorite Saga moments is the build-up to the big reveal of King Robot, a set of fairly traditionally framed single-page layouts, then you flip over (or click next) to a glorious two-page single-character spread. It's hilarious, but it also gives weight to the man who's been pushing Prince Robot around from the background for 21 issues.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:03 PM on November 12, 2015

I read an interview with BKV about how he loved Star Wars, but hated the prequels, but couldn't make his own better SW movie, so he made Saga instead, basically his take on large, far ranging yet character driven Space Opera. Makes sense.
Plus Fiona Staples is butt dropping amazing.
posted by signal at 4:56 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

So the war equals the bigotry, and the first look at the Rebellion, the claimed to be anti-war movement, supports this concept. Appeared in Issue #25, these guys contrived to look super weird even for the world of weirdness. And though we don’t know much about them yet, they are probably interested in “tolerance” like nobody else.

FWIW, this was published in March.

Carry on.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:33 PM on November 12, 2015

The answer is Ghus. If Brian K Vaughan bangs his head badly and turns into Dave Sim, and spends the next several decades spouting bitter, paranoid misogyny, I will keep reading, so long as Fiona Staples makes sure those awful words come out of the mouth of a humanoid baby seal in overalls and footie pajamas.
posted by elr at 5:05 PM on November 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Ghüs.
posted by howfar at 9:45 AM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Goose?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:38 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Vaughan And Martin’s ‘Barrier’ #1 Deserves All The Fanfare That It Didn’t Actually Get
posted by Artw at 9:13 AM on December 2, 2015

Last week's issue reminded me of one reason why I love Saga. A universe that just happens to have multiple LGBT characters? Yes. Spoiler.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:57 AM on December 3, 2015