By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Fiona Staples (art)
The Story: Most mothers only joke that it feels like they’re giving birth to a little planet.
The Review: In Saga #8, we got a deeper glimpse into A Night Time Smoke, a book which figures heavily in Alana’s history as a soldier and whose contents interested Prince Robot too much to just be a trashy romance. Clearly, there’s more to the book than a steamy attraction between a flesh-and-blood girl and a rock monster, but what that is exactly is more of a mystery, as well as the exact impact it had on our heroes’ lives.
Here, we finally learn more about the exact nature of A Night Time Smoke. Despite the rather mundane language Alana reads from the book, the words seem to stun Marko. Amazingly, he sees “[i]t’s not a love story at all, is it? It’s about us, about the war between Landfall and Wreath.” You should read the excerpt of the book yourself, but as an English major, even I feel there’s some extreme extrapolation going on for Marko to make that conclusion.
And as an English major, I know the danger of that kind of deep reading. While Alana does agree with Marko that the book is written in “code” and that the author is saying that “this war between our people has gone on too long, that it has to be stopped,” she stops short of his theory that the book is saying the conflict won’t end. But why not? Why does her interpretation outweigh his? I’m just saying there’s a distinct possibility that both of them could be reading too much into the story, which may set them up for disappointment once they meet the storyteller.
Still, it is rather sweet to see them finding so much pleasure out of their Secret Book Club, which apparently consisted of Alana reading aloud while Marko pretended to work on the chain gang. This is quite a jump from the last flashback of the couple in #8, where Alana clobbered the teeth out of Marko’s head. As romantic and wonderful as their scene is here, I think we all would’ve liked to have seen how they started SBC in the first place, how they both got the notion that they were kindred spirits.
Against this personal storyline, Vaughan continues to throw in his own style of zany sci-fi concepts. While he’s not as interested in stretching the boundaries of time, space, and physics as the ever-experimental Grant Morrison, Vaughan’s ideas are much more accessible, driven primarily by his gleeful imagination. The Timesuck, an “[a]strologic super predator” born from a planet-sized egg, definitely represents Vaughan at his most creative.
Ultimately, however, things like the Timesuck are only elaborate devices to move his characters to action. The Timesuck provides Alana an opportunity to pull rank on her mother-in-law and show off her own competence in a crisis, and it deepens the friction between Gwendolyn and the Will in a major, potentially irrevocable way—and, come to think of it, the friction between the Will and his targets. Spoiler alert—with the loss of Lying Cat, that makes two of the most important people in Will’s life dead at the hands of Alana and Marko—albeit indirectly and unintentionally.
Staples continues to shamelessly impress, highlighting Vaughan’s strengths every chance she gets. She perfectly conveys every emotional beat in the script, from the deep wells of love between Marko and Alana to the hissy tension between Izabel and Marko’s mom. But where she really outdoes herself is her depiction of the Timesuck, whose fetal birth from the rocky crags of its planetary shell amidst a sickly cosmic glow is one of the eeriest visuals I’ve seen this year.
Conclusion: Another great outing from Saga, delivering equal parts emotional depth and conceptual ingenuity.
Grade: A-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – I’m not going to dwell on this (for fear of my head exploding), but how does one teleport a ghost?
– With Alana, Izabel, and even Marko pissed at her, Marko’s mom easily wins the role of Saga’s least favorite person.
Grade
Conclusion