Saga, Volume 2 by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway. 

As I recently mentioned, I’ve got the entire Saga series (so far) on my iPad.

I read the second volume recently, and enjoyed it. What really grabbed me was the voice: our narrator for a lot of the volume is the future voice of the infant in the present time of the story. The other thing I enjoyed about it is the fact its handling of in-laws: they can, after all, be a real trial for any couple, but when you’re star-crossed lovers from cultures who are at war with one another, there’s that little bit extra force to the interactions, both when they go poorly and when they go surprisingly well. 

The same goes for exes: though Gwendolyn isn’t so interesting yet, she looks like she’ll become more so soon. She and The Will, and the child that is now with them, interest me quite a lot, and I find the parts that deal with their pursuit of Marko and Alana interesting. Prince Robot IV less so, but I can understand why some people like the character. 

The thing that really jumped out at me while reading this volume is the pacing, and how Vaughan and Staples take advantage of medium’s visuality to jump backward and forward in time. I’m sure this is obvious to people who’ve been reading comics all their lives, but I don’t have that much experience with the medium, so I’m still learning about it. Comics, like films, are so heavily visual than shorthand is easier, and such jumps require much less setup—which means, in some ways, pacing works very differently from in prose, where every time jump requires a certain amount of time and page space to perform. This particular volume takes mostly takes place within a very limited space of time—a few hours, really—but it feels as if it moves at a breakneck pace, with interesting reversals and surprises. (Marko’s father is one of the biggest surprises, and I liked him a lot.)