Saga #16

by Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples

Sixteen issues in and by now, pretty much everybody knows Saga. You know the characters, the story and the calibre of the series by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s odd that after reading #16 the first thing that comes to mind is a complaint. Stop the presses! I don’t think that’s ever happened before…

Vaughn uses this issue to not only get us caught up on the time line from issue twelve when Prince Robot shot Heist in the knee cap and we learned that everybody was hiding upstairs, but also to further develop his characters. Everybody gets some screen time, and it’s great. Developing characters into something more than the boring, typical characters is always great and really gets the reader invested into the story. The complaint, as mentioned above, is that the story really hasn’t gone anywhere since Prince Robot shot Mr. Heist in the knee. We’ve gone back in time, so to speak, and covered the tracks up to the point of him getting to Quietus but for all intents and purposes, the story hasn’t moved forward.

We’ve met new characters, we’ve learned about new and old characters, we’ve had some scary moments with characters we love but we’re only just getting to where we were four issues ago. Based on the quality of the material during those four issues, and the fact that we still got interesting issues, it’s not the biggest complaint in the world, but it’s still…

As we’ve come to expect with Fiona Staples, she nails this issue. Regardless of story or direction, Fiona is always on top of her game. She’s quickly become one of the top artists in the industry and she excels at everything she does from Saga to fantastic variant covers. There’s literally nothing negative to say about her work on this issue—or any issue for that matter—and as always it’s an absolute pleasure to see her work.

Small complaint aside, this is still a good issue. It sets up some potentially crazy stuff for the follow up, where we’re sure to have story progression which nobody is going to want to miss. Saga is still great and it’s still better than almost anything else you can find on the shelves, and as usual the next issue can’t come fast enough.