Saga #26

[laughing_tree]

"People are always like 'George R.R. Martin or Joss Whedon – these guys are monsters.' But it used to be when people would read fiction, characters would die all the time. I think we’ve grown up in a sort of culture where a lot of our storytelling is controlled by a big corporation – that means we can’t let these characters die, we have to keep them alive. And that’s just a terrible way for fiction to approach things.

"We read this stuff to prepare us for the worst things that are going to happen to us, and death is the worst." -- Brian K. Vaughan

Comments

[informationgeek]

"But it used to be when people would read fiction, characters would die all the time."

No kidding. I remember all those damn Newbery Medal books I had to read as a kid. The writers always seemed obsessed with death in some way. Reading one of those, you might as well had a timer set to when the main character's friend died...


But anyways, yeah this recent arc. My apathy only continued to grow for these characters. I just don't care about the single damn person in this comic besides Prince Robot, to the point when Marko overdosed, I just shrugged my shoulders and couldn't cared less.

[burkeonthesly]

"Death by Newbery Medal" is a trope.

[informationgeek]

I'm aware of it. Amusingly enough, when I first found it, I looked at all the winners and nominees... about 90% of the books I had to read as a kid were on there. The only one worth damn honestly was Number the Stars.

[burkeonthesly]

I'd recommend the Graveyard Book. I read the Jungle Book when I was a kid (the unabridged Kipling) and the structural parallels in the Graveyard Book were a treat. Sadly, I don't recommend the graphic novel treatment GB got, the linework and character designs are nice but the scene composition is bland, even during scenes that beg for visual interest (there's a scene where a trio of ghouls are brachiating down a giant wall of tombstones, throwing the main character back and forth between them as they go, and the art manages to make it boring).

[silverhammerman]

I think I might be finally reaching the point where waiting on the trades while seeing bits of the terrible things happening in the singles no longer affects me. I would never call it bad, but it's just become apparent that Saga as a story is a bit of a death march.

[q99]

I like tradewaiting too, in part because a lot of stuff does turn out as not being as bad as it looks...

Like "this is how my parents split up" turned out to be about them being physically separated, rather than the implied actual breakup.

This Week, In WHEN TEFL TEACHERS AND COMIC NERDS COLLIDE!:

[captainbellman]

Brian, I do applaud your (refreshing!) approach of making the snooty upperclass bastards all have British accents, but try to do at least some cursory research. No Englishman worth his salt says "bugger all" except where the meaning is interchangeable with "fuck all", or "not very much, my dear old-fashioned thing", in answer to a question such as "What have you been up to these days? Punting up the river, eh? I should say so."

In the trade edition, that erroneous last line could easily be corrected by appending "it" between "Bugger" and "all", making "Bugger it all", not unlike "Damn it all to hell"; or replacing the entire thing with the much more fun "Buggeration", a particular favourite of my own dear Mater.

[q99]

Personally, I find death is overused. It often represented a premature end of a character's story, rather than a satisfying conclusion.

[mrstatham]

I think the overuse of it in comics has absolutely stripped most deaths of all meaning and basically tainted the pool at this point. It does take something really good - a Rucka, a Brubaker, etc - to make me care. Although it's a lot easier to care when it comes to most indie books.

[q99]

Yep. And heck, the resurrection in comics highlights the flaw, which a lot of people haven't picked up- the reason characters come back is because *people still want their stories to continue*. People complain about the resurrections, but IMO the problem is really on the death side.


The key point, I feel, is the good writers make death very organically part of the story and specifically to the dead character's arcs. If it makes sense for a character to die then, makes sense *for that character*, then it works.

[mrstatham]

I actually rather like the way that the incident between Marko and Alana has been handled. It didn't look like that huge an incident to us, but I think it's really interesting that Marko has taken that and contextualised it against his own background and become much more wary of that. That's actually really interesting and mature as an approach to that sort of thing.

I also have no problems with the pacing of this or apathy toward it. It's the next step of the six-issue/trade-written approach, sure, but no more so than something like Morning Glories. Speaking of which, why've we not seen any of that on here?

[informationgeek]

Gees, I once considered doing that but... I feel it is a bit too complicated and complex to do an entry on it. There's just sooooo many parts to this puzzle of a book that I don't feel that I or anyone could do that ride justice.

[akodo_rokku]

I have read every issue of Morning Glories and have no fucking clue what's going on in it. I imagine that's a common experience and probably why it doesn't get posted.