★★★★★ Greater than the sum of its parts

Saga, Compendium One

Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator)

After seeing Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's Saga, Compendium One highly praised by essentially my entire Goodreads feed, I bought the paperback. It arrived, and I did not immediately open it, for a simple reason: It weighs 2.2 kg. (That's 5 pounds in old money.) This is a thick book. So instead I bought all currently extant kindle volumes of the series (currently Saga, Volume 1 through Saga, Volume 11), figuring a series of 11 books was within my capabilities, and began to read them on the kindle app on my iPad. This worked very well.

I found to my surprise that the series was not so overwhelming as my kitchen scale led me to expect. It takes an hour, or at most two, to read one volume. I alternated Saga volumes with other books -- thus, between 18-Feb and 24-Mar-2024 I read the nine volumes that together constitute Compendium One. (Volumes 10 and 11 still lie in my future.) I gave each of them four stars. I'm giving the compendium five stars, because together they are greater than the sum of their parts. I am not a big fan of graphics novels, so this is a breakout rating from me.

What's so great about Saga? Two things: the writing, and the drawing. The story is centered on Hazel, daughter of Marko and Alana, soldiers on opposite sides of a galactic war. But they are surrounded by a complex cast of hit-men, sex workers, hit-men, reporters, and royal robots.

Even to a graphic grump like myself, the drawing is especially impressive. It is not photorealistic, but also, it is not cartoonish. Faces and body language are expressive, The books are often laugh-out-loud funny. As often as not, I laughed not because of what just happened, but because of the expression on someone's face.

Highly recommended, even if you think you don't like graphic novels.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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