Reflections

I am not a graphic novel person. I’m not sure why, but instead of artwork on the pages I see something close to a chaos of jumbled drawings spackled with confusing bubbles of print--probably some brain glitch, a kind of graphic image dyslexia maybe. But I’ve read and heard raves about Saga and I certainly liked the sound of the storyline: two humanoids from warring alien races--his with horns & hers with wings--fall in love, have a baby, and then are on the run from both of their peoples. Sort of a space opera Romeo and Juliet. So I got Saga from my library and liked it well enough to read the whole book--a graphic novel first for me--but couldn’t love it.

What I liked:

• The story panels are large and fairly regular in size so my brain glitch didn’t kick in much,
• The panels are colorful, a page of smallish black and white sketches is harder for me to process,
• The print is not askew, cramped, crooked or variously sized to express emotion--also a help for my quirk,
• The main characters are wonderful, strong and caring individuals, and while they  love each other they are still trying to work out their (very interesting) differences,
• And the story is exciting and even witty.

What I didn’t like:

• Some of the villains and even some of the “good guys” are so creepy looking I didn’t want to look. Which is another quirk of mine. I love the storylines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for instance, we have every season on DVD because my daughters love the show, but can’t take the sight of all those disturbing evil menace characters (and I’m not talking about someone like Spike--I love him.)

This is the start of a series and the story is well introduced though it doesn’t go very far in this book, but I can highly recommend Saga to anyone who doesn’t have excessive squeamishness or general difficulty enjoying graphic novels.