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The only other woman I had ever seen breastfeeding was my mother. I remember stumbling in on her feeding my little sister a month or two after she was born and then promptly shutting the door and going back to the living room to watch Swat Cats. This time it wasn’t my mother needlessly hiding herself away in her bedroom (though she might have just needed to be somewhere quiet and my near-constant Swat Cats 
marathon probably wasn’t what she needed) but was in fact a member of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of. The woman was unforgettable with her purple hair and Nightmare on Elm Street t-shirt, but what struck me was, while I was delivering my usual lecture, this time on the graphic novel Saga, she actually lifted up her baby, opened her shirt, and held her child up to her breast. I had never seen anyone breast-feed in public before, and seeing it sitting right next to me, I wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would ever have a problem with- it. The kid was hungry and it wasn’t affecting me personally, so I carried on explaining why I thought Saga, which was also decorated with a breast-feeding mother, just wasn’t an interesting book.
My attitudes towards breast-feeding in public remain the same, let mothers feed their children damn it, but I’ve softened towards Saga.
There was a woman who used to work at the library who I considered a close friend, and that’s why it hit me pretty hard when she announced that she was leaving the library for one in Dallas. I understood that her reasons were a combination of desire for better pay as well as to be closer to her boyfriend, but I have trouble finding people who seem to like me so I was pretty bummed. The only real sort of solace I had in the whole thing was that, because she was leaving, that meant that I would be the only person in the library who really knew the graphic novel section, and so, once my supervisors approved, I became the one responsible for shelving the graphic novels. This task is one that, to say I’ve warmed up to it is putting it mildly, I fucking love it. Pushing my green cart to the second floor I take a good 15 minutes a day just to rearrange the shelves, prop up new books for patrons passing through the area, arranging the tipped over or worn books up to their proper place, and while I am shelving I almost always find a fantastic book I want to read. One of them was Saga and, while I admit a moment ago I didn’t find the book terribly wonderful the first time I read it, looking at Marko and Alana on the cover there was the same impulse there always is, a little kid who read Calvin & Hobbes over and over and over again saying, “Check it out, you got a library card!”
I grabbed the first two volumes on my way back down to help a woman send a fax.
There’s too much of Saga to try and tackle all of it in just one essay, and I’m not even looking at just the first volume. While I’m writing this I’m currently on Volume six, and I’m positive by the time I finish this essay I’ll probably be at the last volume, (it’s up to eight right now) and become one of the I’m sure millions currently devouring this book every time it hits the shelves. I’ve also finished all of Sex Criminals so if I start appearing peaked it’s because I’ll be sucking comic-book writer’s dicks for new issues. My other real challenge is the fact that Saga is beloved, or, put it another way, Saga is the comic book that people who hate comics read. Being friends with the owner of Ground Zero Comics (though I suppose I’m being charitable he may not consider me a friend at all and now I look foolish) he’s often talking about his patrons who come in trying to their wives, girlfriends, etc. into comics, and while the first option is almost always Sandman Vol 2 The Doll’s House, Saga is the series he almost always cites as the second option.
It’s not hard to see why, given the fact that the series is written as one long emotional melodrama, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Rather than superhero comics which are often defined by physical gods fighting the forces of evil in tight outfits and experiencing their own sort of melodramas (nobody ever really dies and there’s always a brother 
who’s supposed to be dead but who turns out to actually be alive or a clone or some shit), Saga is drama about family centered in race, specifically race mixing. Alana and Marko are people from different cultures, different races which are war with one another. Marko is from Wreath, the only moon of the planet Landfall the homeward of Alana. Marko’s people practice magic, whereas Alana’s people tend to gravitate more towards science and technology. Because war, meaning total destruction of each other’s planets, could potentially destabilize the orbits of their worlds the cultures have moved their war to other planets thus involving a wide variety of peoples in this conflict and creating universal destabilization. Marko becomes a prisoner of Landfall’s coalition where he meets and falls in love with Alana. And because people in love have a tendency to fuck, Alana becomes pregnant which is where the series actually begins.
The first page is memorable for a variety of reasons:
Allright, in all fairness, there’s really just one reason why this page is so striking: too many people forget that when babies are born they aren’t born with any original bacteria in their intestines to help with digestion. Because of this humans evolved so that it was common for a pregnant woman to void her bowels during labor so that the bacteria in her feces would introduce bacteria into the baby’s body. Now breast-milk is also a common way for mothers to transfer this bacteria, thus offering me another opportunity to remind my reader that breast-feeding is more important than your 
discomfort, but it should be noted that pregnant women also tend to poop because, well, shit’s happening.
But that first line, carefully outlining Alana’s reddened face is an important one because Brian K. Vaughn frames the narrative of Saga as first person narration in the veing of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Saga is the story of a woman named Hazel who is the product of an interracial union narrating her life story to her audience. She introduces herself, not as a person, not as an individual ego, but more of an idea.
This is how an idea becomes real. But ideas are fragile things. Most don’t live long outside at the ether from which they were pulled, kicking and screaming. That’s why people create with someone else. Two people can sometimes improve the odds of an ideas survival…but there are no guarantees. Anyway, this is the day I was born. (1-4).
Vaughn’s writing style is something I’ve had plenty of opportunities to explore and study and that’s largely because of my friend TJ. As I’ve noted in several of my previous essays, he’s the founder of the local Graphic Novel Book Club that meets bi-weekly at Ground 
Zero Comics, and because of this prestige position he gets to decide which books are read in the group. We’ve read quite a number of books over the years ranging from Understanding Comics to Transmetropolitian to Sandman to Fun Home, but many members have observed that, in the last year alone, we’ve read close to six or seven of the man’s books and this has lead some to label us the “Brian K. Vaughn appreciation society.” There is some disagreement upon this suggestion largely because we’ve also read plenty of Jeff Lemire. The coming war between the Vaughnites and Lemirians is coming and I’m not sure how many lives will ultimately be lost.
But this is just a way of saying that reading Saga is much like reading many of the other Vaughn books and the man has a real tendency to build up his spaces. Saga is not just an intimate love story between Alana and Marko, it’s an opportunity to observe countless 
species and peoples, all of whom are impacted by the war between the two races. The reader is sometimes bombarded by this enormous amount of oddity, and while the first time I was overwhelmed by this treatment, as time in the story progressed I became more and more used to the oddity of the humanity. And this I believe is its own sort of method.
Race is very much biological, your DNA will always determine your physical characteristics as well as plenty of facets of personality, but race is also rooted in cultural and individual psychology. Observing someone’s physical characteristics and observing difference is not racism, it’s only when one allows those observation of differences to form bias that the corrosive quality of racism manifests.
A racist is ultimately formed by a subculture that educates them that differences in physical characteristics such as skin color, or more abstract qualities such as language or nationality, are an indication of lesser worth. 
What’s incredible then about the graphic novel Saga is that, much like the Star Wars and Star Trek films before it, the reader is constantly exposed to individuals of different races and species intermingling without too much concern that such interactions are taking place. The reader is able to see the physical differences, and encouraged to just accept these characters as people. Whether it’s the Prince Robot IV and his television head, the floating ghost specter with half a body named Isabel, the half spider half human freelancer known simply as “The Stalk,” or my favorite character Petrichor a MTF transgender woman from Wreath. Saga encourages the reader to see that race is biological, but that racism is ultimately just the social construct because regardless
of physiology, anatomy, or whether you’re a pothead actress made out of moss, people are people, and their qualities are what ultimately define them.
That would have been my end to Saga were it not for the fact that recently I’ve begun a new routine. With the rightful fall of Charlie Rose, my morning breakfast routine has been shaken up dramatically because I used to watch interviews and eat. I’ve now taken to watching Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and of course The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. This later one provides me with some news of the day and some means of maintaining my sanity as I watch the current administration do its…let’s say thing. I like Colbert, he makes me laugh, and he gives me something to think 
about when I’m shoveling my eggs, donuts, and tea down my throat as I get ready for work. Most recently however he interviewed Trevor Noah, complimenting him about his time on the Daily Show, revealing to the world that Noah had a brief appearance in the film Black Panther, and then asking him about the issue of race. It was during this last conversation that Noah reminded me about his eloquence, but then also about the larger narrative of racism in South Africa.
And during this interview Noah pointed out that, ultimately, his existence voided the larger racist narrative. If one race in power argues that race-mixing cannot produce offspring it voids and ultimately destroys the racist narrative to begin with. This shouldn’t have been such a powerful observation, but hearing him express it as such made me pause and really dwell on that statement. It also made me go back to his biography and look through a few of the passages.
Noah’s memoir Born a Crime doesn’t just mirror Saga, it could almost be its own spin-off. Noah imbues his life story with plenty of wit and humor, but constantly throughout the book he is able to demonstrate a real intelligence about the farce that was the governmental race policy of his home nation.
He writes in one chapter:
In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. (21).
Looking then at Saga this is most certainly the case because Vaughn and Fiona Staples, the illustrator who deserves an entire essay to herself, show the family as constantly on the run from the two central organizations of their homewards who see their union as not just a threat to the larger war effort, but to the very war itself. The war between Wreath and Landfall is a racial war, it’s a war founded on the idea that the two races not only should not intermingle and interbreed, but that they cannot. Alana and Marko, and by extension Hazel is a rejection of that system. Its proof that the war is, ultimately, bullshit.
Noah’s biography goes on to note the length to which apartheid was ridiculous and cruel:
Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.
The government went to insane lengths to try and enforce these laws. The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison. There were whole police squads whose only job was to go around peeking through windows—clearly an assignment for only the finest law enforcement officers. And if an interracial couple got caught, God help them. The police would kick down the door, drag the people out, beat them, and arrest them. At least that’s what they did to the black person. With the white person it was more like, “Look I’ll just say you were drunk, but don’t do it again, eh? Cheers.” That’s how it was with a white man a black woman. If a black man was caught having sex with a white woman, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t charged with rape.” (22).
There’s a brief moment in Saga when Prince Robot IV is being briefed by a Landfall intelligence officer about the couple and the subject of Alana’s consent is mentioned. Alana’s pregnancy is observed and Robot IV says rather plainly,
“Love child? Surely he forced himself on her.” (24)
And this is, ultimately, everything. The narrative of the war and the races has become so ingrained in the zeitgeist, so embedded into the universal culture of Saga that two people of Landfall and Wreath falling in love and conceiving a child is not only inconceivable, it’s repulsive. There’s also the fact that throughout the text Marko’s people speak a language that often appears to be some sort of slavic tongue mixed in with Spanish which makes the theme of racism all the more potent.
Hazel as a character is an idea and a material reality for her very existence is a crime. Saga as a work of art then is not something that is just relevant it’s historical pertinent. Often the charge against graphic novels is that they are too fantastic, too hyperbolic, or else that they are too much like a melodrama or a soap opera. My argument against this charge is that while Saga is all of these things, it still manages to consistently say something about humanity which that we are more than the petty and paltry divisions which are used to allow suffering.
Rape camps, racism, sexual slavery, transphobia, and murder for hire are all concepts which are explored in the Saga Series, and while many would prefer that it didn’t exist,
all of these concepts are realities that are still plaguing society. Saga doesn’t just create a new world, fill it with quirky languages and science fiction creatures for the sake of delving into high fantasy; the book is an effort to touch and explore that which is most human. Love is ultimately a biological imperative based in chemistry to get us to reproduce, but looking past this and seeing how we allow it to create meaning in our lives the story of Hazel is a 
story which, as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime demonstrates, is an ongoing narrative.
People like to fuck, and people like to fall in love. Regardless of a person’s sex, gender identity, race, or nationality everyone has the capacity to love another human being. And this idea is powerful because love allows more than just two people to come together and find one another. People comes with families, friends, associations, organizations, creeds, and personal ideologies all of which expose each person of the relationship to new ideas and people which expand their world.
Talking about Saga, and watching that woman breastfeed beside me, was a chance to observe other people, to explore a new way of thinking, and listen to other people’s opinions about what the book meant to them. In a period and time when it feels more and more like human beings are looking for excuses and reasons to “other” each other (pardon that pathetic string of words) it speaks to the power of a book to ask its reader if those differences are really so profound that we can’t find some excuse to recognize another person’s humanity, and maybe see them as somebody we’d like to know, or fuck, or even love.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes cited from Saga Volume 1 were taken from the paperback Image copy edition. All quotes cited from Born a Crime were cited from the first edition hardback Spiegel & Grau copy.
**Writer’s Note**
I really wanted to cite Trevor Noah directly in this essay but it just didn’t work out that way. So instead here’s the original interview from The Late Show. Please enjoy, and please remember to take the time to appreciate that they got Trevor Noah to be an A.I. hologram in the movie Black Panther.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6V4gLAat4
***Writer’s Note***
I didn’t get a chance to do it here, and maybe hopefully at some point I’ll have time to write a long treatise, but having now read the entrety of the Saga series run published thus far, my absolute favorite character, after Ghus, is Petrichor. I don’t know whether or not it’s because she’s beautiful or else because she’s hysterical, but I adore her more than anything in the world, and I admit with no shame whatsoever that I have the individual issue with her on the cover in my bookshelf.
Patrichor is BAE.
consider my familiarity with cinema to be one of my weaknesses, and I’m hardly a neophyte to the field given how much I’ve written and studied in the subject, I’m real enough to know when I’m speaking with someone who has a far more nuanced perspective. Such a person is my friend TJ. I’ve known TJ for about four years, we were originally introduced when a mutual friend recommended that I join a graphic novel bookclub TJ had started up, and he’s quickly become one of the closest friends I have. I love having a friend and co-worker who has an educated opinion about comics, but it’s in film that the pair of us tend to have the most extended conversations.
struggle through the film was entirely centered in this problem. The very opening scenes of the film involves a black man walking through a neighborhood before he is abducted. His body is captured before the film opens and one of the first scenes the reader gets of Chris is his body while he’s shaving and he cuts himself. Chris, as the reader observes in the film, is a young photographer who’s dating a white woman and the film follows the pair of them as they drive up to the country (the region is never specified but it really shouldn’t matter because white people are crazy wherever you go) to see Rose’s parents. On the way to the house, while Rose is driving and the pair of them are discussing Chris’s friend Rod and Chris’s habit of smoking, a deer collides with the front of their car.
see it still breathing with a large hole in it’s chest. The scene is powerful as the reader watches the deer, wondering if it’s supposed to be an omen of what’s to come, whether the deer mirrors Chris, or if the entire scene is just used to create an early scare and build up the tension in the audience. The sensation of watching Get Out is more or less summarized in this small scene because, as I noted to my friend, virtually every element and component of Get Out is connected to something else.
“there goes the neighborhood,” which itself is connected to actual expressions by white racists when black families would move in. What’s taking place in this scene however is a double play because while Dean Armitage is saying this about deer, and mimicking racists, he’s trying to present himself as a man who is open minded but clumsily being racist. Throughout Get Out Peele has the family portrayed as Northern Progressive Liberals, the kind of people who enjoy their white privilege but who also profess dedication to helping African Americans who are “disadvantaged.” This is probably best exemplified when Dean is talking to Chris one on one:
people, white and black, believe is larger. What is also true, and probably more important, is that many of those white people believe that “larger” black penis has a major—read: “dangerous”—cultural meaning. (125).
my research, you know, ’cause as a TSA agent. You know, you guys are detectives. You know, I got the same training. We might know more than y’all sometimes, you know, ’cause we are dealing with some terrorist shit, so… but that’s a totally different story. So look, I-I go do my… my detective work, right? And I start putting pieces together. And see, this is what I came up with. They’re probably abducting black people, brainwashing them and making them slaves… or sex slaves. Not just regular slaves, but sex slaves and shit. See? I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis that’s making ’em slaves or what not, but all I know is they already got two brothas we know and there could be a whole bunch of brothas they got already. What’s the next move?
merely changes. Peele’s film allows the reader to see then how the racism has changed, yet ultimately remained the same.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in his landmark book, Between the World and Me, reflects on the death of a friend who was shot by a policeman and the entire book is written as a series of letters to his son. Coates addresses his son directly noting the position of his body in the culture:
the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
and while the Marxists would latch onto this in order to explain deeper notions of hegemony and economic domination, what is at heart in all of this is the idea that people are not allowed the agency of their own bodies.
win. While there is some Victory in Chris escaping, and killing the entire Armitage family as he fights his way out, there is still the deeper implication that even if he escapes there the lingering question of the victims. Upon finishing Get Out again recently I asked my friend this question: what happens to the people who were stolen? There was no answer to this question and in fact I don’t have one.
win in this society, and even if he does it comes at a great cost. Chris will never be the same after this experience, the reader is able to see that as the car drives away and he stares detached out into the forrest.
right, who were laughing. I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater. I just couldn’t help it. There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.
I suppose I understand. There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.
appearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes. And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out. Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film. I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work. But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far. Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.
In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism. There is very little free expression of the emotions. The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting. And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder. (38-9).
-tale, myth, of Siegfried. Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world. Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love. One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.” In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.
the “One-Big-Ass-Mistake-America” stickers as well as the “NO” that used the cloudy “O” from President Obama’s first campaign. Living in Texas you get used to such rhetoric because Obama is a Democrat and democrats, like communists and liberals, are ghoulish creatures that emerge from the black pit of Washington D.C. to come and devour our children, freedom, health-care, businesses, and, if we’re especially unlucky, our guns too. I wasn’t bothered by the partisan bullshit because every asshole believes expressing his individuality through a bumper-sticker makes him part of the discourse.
the fact the last book was Absalom, Absalom I was nervous as fucking hell. I only in the last few weeks have completed the exhausted physical and psychological recovery of such a long painful affair that left me stimulated and devastated intellectually. Light in August however was actually an amazing read, and true to Faulknerian style, the book was ultimately demonstrating the atmosphere of the post-Civil War south as a scene of internal corruption mixed with the complicated nature of race embodied in the character of Joe Christmas. Faulkner and nigger tend to go hand in hand (he was a white man writing in Mississippi, it was gonna happen) and the first real recognition of the word struck me. Christmas is an orphan who steals into the orphanage’s dietician’s office to grab some toothpaste when he is interrupted. The dietician, a 26 year old woman, begins to have sex with a man until she hears Christmas coughing and when she finds him she says:
university where most of the students and faculty are white I was curious about Nigger.
precisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning. We do know, however, that by the end of first third of nineteenth century, nigger had already become a familiar and influential insult. (4) 
After this Kennedy addresses a conflict that is about at least a century old at this point: the use of the word nigger in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There have been entire books written about this subject, and rather than list out every position taken I’d rather just quote Kennedy because he speaks much clearer and with less pathetic attempt at humor. Addressing the argument that Huckleberry Finn proliferates racism by using the word nigger frequently Kennedy contends that:
branding the whites. (109).
Michael Brown was shot, and in that space of time the United States has suffered more and more tragedy and the conversation about black/white relations in America has become a more pressing subject. In our current atmosphere where conservatives are telling jokes about Black Lives Matter groups, and self-hating-self-aggrandizing liberals are bashing cops on twitter hoping they can be “cool” it’s easy to lose track of what the real problem is, and a perfect microcosm of this is Larry Wilmore’s half hour appearance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner.
that using that word really isn’t that bad. Wilmore received criticism from both black and white commentators for a score of reasons, but like many scrambling to alight Twain’s Huckleberry Finn on fire, most of these critics were people who just didn’t get the joke.
If you’re still bitching about the fact that that isn’t fair remember the Grandfather in The Princess Bride who played Colombo for years: “Well who said life is fair? Where is that written?”
than burden his reader with his “languishing in prison,” in fact King’s prose almost makes one chuckle as he treats his incarceration with annoyance rather than sadness, he instead uses his time as an opportunity to instruct those participating in the cause of integration on the value of being a contrarian. His careful prose repeatedly attacks the shock that black protests inspired.
needs are met, that is all that matters.
so that he or she may stave off the desired confrontation and eventually abandon their willpower. The repeated call, both then and now it seems, for blacks in this country hoping for justice has often been to wait, and we have seen that while they wait, injustice has been repeatedly been committed to them. It has become a rite of passage in black communities for mothers and father to teach their sons the “proper” way to behave to police officers. They are instructed to “wait” and not inspire confrontation. As a white man I was never given this lesson because there was no need to. I understood, and still understand, the social role of the police officer is to ensure order and maintain it. I will admit that while I respect members of the police, my upraising and educational environment has created a nasty distrust of authority figures, and the image of the police officer inspires a combination of admiration and panic. But to return to the argument at hand, King’s remarks speak true to human experience. It is often noted, almost to the level of platitude, that those who refuse to choose a side are often impaled by the fence they stand on. Christopher Hitchens in his little wonderful book letters to a young contrarian perhaps noted it best that there was a reason Dante Aligheri placed one
The Trial of Emmett Till, yet another black man executed in the south for ridiculous and repulsive reasons, did not wait. Even if the trial ended in the murderers being acquitted, the country recognized the situation for what it was: a travesty of injustice that would leave a permanent smear, not only on the face of this country, but for the conscience of those who would profess of the warm boon of “the South.” As a Texan, the concept of race is unavoidable. Daily I am regularly shocked and deeply offended when I hear of whites talking of “Mexicans,” (how long must intelligent people suffer before the word Latina enters the common tongue), as “parasites” and “invaders.” Attending a private school of mostly white upper class children, there were perhaps seven black students in the entirety of my high school education, I would gag on the free use of the word “niggars” and wonder about what breed of Christian this school was attempting to excrete. This collected examination leads me to my final conclusion of the Brown affair and what Letters from Birmingham Jail really mean in relation to it.
community. The second was a thought, “I can only wonder how long the news will bother with this before they return to Gaza.” Fortunately and unfortunately, the violence that erupted in Ferguson on August 10th resulted in a media hunger before the collected news organizations realized a threat to their own interests. Now with the arrest of two of their own, the press seems to have a shared interest in the case. Injustice creates a brotherhood that transcends skin color. We all seem to have taken a personal interest in this case, but what troubles me most is that the efforts of reporters seems to be focused, not on the abuse of power that led to Michael Brown’s death, but the abuse of police officers upon those who are attempting to understand the injustice and bring light to it. Michael Brown is quickly being stripped of his self and humanity as the “police” become the center of this debate.