ART: Fiona Staples
Brian K. Vaughan is one of the comic book industry's most talented writers and Saga is a spectacular reminder of this fact. In a nutshell, Saga is about a war between the citizens of a planet (Landfall) and it's moon (Cleave). The main characters are a woman from Landfall and a man from Cleave who fall in love and bear a child under scrutiny from both sides of the conflict. Vaughan employs a rather experimental storytelling style, using the newborn child's future self as the omniscient narrator giving readers supplemental information to what's drawn in the panels.
Issue two introduces some new elements to Marko and Alana's journey with baby Hazel: bounty hunters. Called 'freelancers' in Vaughan's sci-fi universe, two of these hunters are shown, the first being a rather normal looking fellow from the first issue called The Will. The other hunter, called The Stalk, apparently strikes fear into all the other freelancers as the best in the business, which doesn't spell good fortune for Marko and Alana when they come face-to-face with the Stalk and her general giant-spiderness.
Down on Landfall, the Robot Prince is looking for Alana, the escaped solider when his TV monitor head suddenly flickers with a rage-filled face, to which a lowly infantryman becomes uncomfortable with. It's obvious that emotion is going to be a major driving force behind Saga, which is fantastic. When Marko and Alana confront the Stalk, Alana threatens to kill her own child rather than let it fall into the hands of the robots. Even knowing that this outcome would probably not come to happen, I was worried that Alana would have to pull the trigger. Being emotionally invested in comic book characters is difficult, and Vaughan has succeeded in spades.
While not as action-filled as the first issue, Saga #2 succeeds in pushing the narrative forward and dropping multiple clues about the future of this series. In a world as big and expansive as the one Vaughan has built for this series, taking time to flesh out the characters and their surroundings is important. So far, I feel like I've known these characters all my life.
GRADE:
A+
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