Saga is an epic space opera/fantasy comic book series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples, published monthly by Image Comics. A tree that doubles as a rocket ship. Aristocratic villains in 18th-century military dress with televisions for heads. A hairless cat who growls “LYING” at any knowingly untrue statement. A planet-sized bordello hosted by a pair of women’s heads on fishnet-stocking-wearing legs. This is but a dash of the unbelievable imagery you encounter in just the first six issues of Saga – a comic-book epic proves there’s still room for originality in the over-franchised world of sci-fi. The space opera—a sub-genre of science fiction that tends towards vivid, romantic fantasy and swashbuckling action and away from “harder,” more speculative sci-fi—has never really gone fully out of vogue since the success of Star Wars. But it’s gotten pretty stagnant, recycling the most universally recognizable tropes. What Saga is doing feels different and invigorating. It’s inspired by a fictional universe Vaughan created as a child and never stopped revisiting, and its core elements have the kind of loopy, fearless freshness only a young mind could generate.
Top Posts & Pages
The Inn at the Edge of the World
Click image to read my short story 'The Inn at the Edge of the World' in Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, Vol. 8.
The Witch of Wicken Fen
Click image to read my short story 'The Witch of Wicken Fen' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Tolkien
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After the King: Tolkien’s heirs
It is something of a relief, having looked last month at his critics, to turn this time to Tolkien’s many admirers. It would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E R Eddison and […]
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Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics
“This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.” With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgment of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of […]
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The Wolf in the Attic
1920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a […]
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Of Wood Woses and Wild Men
In The Lord of the Rings a strange and primitive folk named the Woses came to aid the men of Gondor in breaking the siege of Minas Tirith. These wild woodland people lived in the ancient forest of Druadan, below the White Mountains. In form they were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied and they knew wood-craft […]
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Spawn of Ungoliant
Among the foulest beings that ever inhabited Middle Earth were the Great Spiders. They were dark and filled with envy, greed and the poison of malice. First of the beings that took spider form was Ungoliant, mother of the evil race that plagued the world thereafter, as well as a close ally of the first […]
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