Saga Vol. 5 (2015)

Saga Vol. 5 Review

Saga is an epic space opera fantasy comic book series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples. The fifth volume covering issues 25 to 30 was published in 2015.

While Gwendolyn and Lying Cat risk everything to find a cure for The Will, Marko makes an uneasy alliance with Prince Robot IV to find their missing children, who are trapped on a strange world with terrifying new enemies. This entry wasn’t quite up to par with its predecessors, but it still had some excellent moments to boot. Dengo was a terrifying villain in the previous volume, but here he was humanized for better and for worse. I found his arc a bit rushed and his death too untimely.

The Will is incapacitated in this volume and the end result is a couple of issues of storytelling without him. I definitely felt his absence personally. The Brand was never properly developed, so I didn’t feel anything when she died. This volume killed off a couple of important side characters and in a very brutal, sudden fashion, but for the most part its insistence on being edgy, gory and violent felt too immature and forced instead of genuinely earned.

With that being said, I still found the illustration work to be superb and I loved the world building here. Those salamander creatures were super cool and Ghus of course was as adorable as ever. Prince Robot IV continues to be an intriguing presence. Alana was a bit sidelined, but we get to see Marko’s troubled history and those scenes were quite moving. This volume is quite emotional and dramatic, but not raising the stakes in plot progression as much as others did.

The fifth volume of Saga for the most part was pretty strong, though far from great. The illustration work is terrific and some moments were fantastic, but many characters were sidelined and the violence was excessive.

My Rating – 4.1