I remember being pretty excited when Brian K. Vaughan's Saga first came out. Not only was Brian quite a handsome devil, he'd also brought me great joy via Y: The Last Man (starting in September 2002), Ex Machina (starting in August 2004), and he'd written seven episodes of Lost (2007 to 2009) 1 . How could Saga possibly go wrong? But when it made its debut on March 14, 2012, I wasn't there. I don't know why. As in I can't remember. It's possible that The Great Escape sold out of the first issue by the time I got to the store, as I rarely make the effort to get there on New Comics Wednesday. But clearly I was interested, as when I checked my Comixology purchases I found issues 1, 2 and 3 ensconced in the My Comics file. And the rest was silence. I do have a vague memory of being turned off by some tv-headed character fucking someone or getting a blow job from someone or something of that ilk. Not sure why that would have turned me off, actually, but maybe there was more to it than that faint shit stain of memory on the underpants of my mind. At any rate, I just didn't go back to Saga. Until recently, when I found that the good old LFPL had all five of the paperback collections which have been published to date . . . which actually brings us to the current issue, since #31 doesn't come out for another eleven days as of this writing (Saga #31 is to be published November 25, 2015, according to the Image website). So I decided to dive in and see what, if anything, I'd been missing.
I had to start with the second collection, since somebody else had the first, but (1) I had read the first three issues way back when, so that was half of the first tpb, and (2) I actually had some memory of the events from those issues. And I enjoyed Saga, Volume 2 quite a bit, actually. Enough to go through it in pretty much one sitting and to head directly into Saga, Volume 3 this morning. Ah, Volume 3. That's where I really got into it. And it was the D. Oswald Heist bits that really put it over the top for me. (Though I also liked Lying Cat quite a bit.) But . . . oh, man, that wily old fuck really cracks me up. One of my favorite two lines from Saga (at the moment, anyway) comes into the scene with D. Oswald: " . . . no one makes worse first impressions than writers."
(Chapter 13) That's just good shit. 2
So I'm on my way. I'll finish Volume 3 in a minute (have to, it's due back at the library; some other motherfucker apparently wants to piss in my corner) and pick up Volume 4, which is waiting for me. And by then Volume 1 should have shaken loose. And then I'm on the list for Volume 5. Ta-da. Funny, ennit? You can read 3 1/2 years's worth of comic book in a day or two. Has much more of a punch that way, too.
Thanks, LFPL. Thanks, Brian K. Vaughan.
1 In case you give a shit, here are the titles of the episodes BKV wrote: (1) "Dead Is Dead" (2009), (2) "Namaste" (2009), (3) "The Little Prince" (2009), (4) "The Shape of Things to Come" (2008), (5) "Meet Kevin Johnson" (2008), (6) "Confirmed Dead" (2008), and (7) "Catch-22" (2007).
2 In case you give another shit, my other favorite line (so far, etc.) is, "Life is mostly just learning how to lose." (Chapter 15)
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