Saga #62: The Revenger’s Tragedy

Issue #62 opens with an example of Fiona Staples’ trademark arresting imagery, and the chapter unspools from there in a way that feels simultaneously organic and perfectly plotted. From the image of Marco’s heartless, beheaded body lying (bruised and rotting) in the dirt, we follow our heroes (such as they are) to the back alley of a magical pawnshop (where promises are made to be broken) before setting up shop in the aforementioned grubby food court where we’re presented with a version of story time that is at least as simultaneously appetizing and repulsive as the repast Hazel and her brother sit down to eat.

Vaughan’s genius hinges on his profound understanding of who these people naturally are, what their histories have set them up to be, and how the events of their lives have changed them. This is a difficult trick to convey on the page, despite being the one trick most of us master in our own real lives, but he manages it believably. So we have an exhausted former soldier (and practiced liar) advising her children on how to discern truth from fiction, even as she sets out to teach them to use fiction to see the truth. We have a Federal Agent murdering entire families to get his job done, without ever really thinking of them as real people, even as a former bounty hunter contemplates asking the mother of the child he once adopted to be his wife. 

A lot happens, but the pacing never once slackens. The story passes as swiftly as a dream, even as it delves into the realm of nightmare. 

There are a few problems. Vaughan’s dislike and criticism of evolving art to fit the morality of a new emerging culture rear its head again (as it did before when he had a character threaten child rape and simultaneously badmouth content warnings as a concept), this time his displeasure surfaced through Hazel objecting to a casual slur in her mother’s favorite book and thereby missing the message hidden beneath the trappings of the slur. It’s strange that it never seems to occur to a writer of Vaughan’s caliber that an artist can be (should be) adverse to causing destruction for no purpose beyond the shock that destruction elicits. Shocking one’s readers out of moral and intellectual complacency has been the authorial standard operating procedure since Socrates (the original cultural gadfly, natch) but traumatizing people for the sake of generating controversy is a trick well below an artist of Vaughn’s rank and the story would be better if he dropped it.

Fiona Staples’ art is, as ever, carefully considered and brilliantly nuanced beneath its deceptively simplistic veneer. She’s adept at setting scenes of absolutely horrific brutality and violence within conventional trappings, and there’s no one who can design a believable alien world quite as thoroughly as she can. 

Aside from a singular (avoidable) misstep, this was another beautifully wrought chapter in what will prove to be one of the most important works in the medium of comics.