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Dude, I LOVE this series! I have read (I think) through Volume 2. Your description is spot-on and I am glad to hear you are writing your own comic. I would love to see what you have!
--Ms. Nelson

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This week, comic shop shelves got a little heavier with the release of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' luminous hardcover edition of "Saga." Combining the first three arcs with loads of delicious extras, this edition is a stunning reflection of the collaboration between its creators: detailed, thoughtful and mischievous.

"Saga" is now twenty-four issues in and has lived up to its name, spanning genres while inventing creatures and worlds that defy categorization. At its core, "Saga" is the story of relationships - parents and children; husbands and wives; robots and sex workers; and Lying Cats and assassins. No matter how strange the terrain is, the exhilarating and sometimes exasperating honesty of what transpires between these characters is familiar. Now, as the fourth arc comes to a close and Marko and Alana are paused in turmoil until issue #25 is released in January, fans have both the hardcover to explore as well as the next trade paperback, hitting shelves in late December.
RELATED: NYCC: Brian K. Vaughan on Crafting the World of "Saga"
With so many exciting developments in the series, Vaughan spent some time catching up with CBR News on everything from the curation process of the hardcover - including controversy around the breast feeding displayed on its cover - to the disappointment that may lie ahead for Marko and Alana fans waiting for reconciliation. Plus, check out an exclusive first look at the wraparound cover for "Saga" #25.
CBR News: Brian, let's start by talking about the gorgeous hardcover book. How does it feel to have something like this? Did you and Fiona ever think you'd be holding this?
Brian K. Vaughan: No way. I've said this before, but I seriously thought we'd be cancelled by our sixth issue. Before we launched "Saga" a few years ago, I'd been out of comics for a while, and my previous publisher Wildstorm had just folded. It felt like the audience for creator-owned comics had started to contract or outright disappear, and a lot of my friends at other companies tried to dissuade me from launching something original in that kind of conservative marketplace, especially a story that had naked full-frontal robots instead of superheroes.

But Fiona and I obviously benefitted from the creator-owned surge that Eric Stephenson and Robert Kirkman had already helped get underway at Image Comics. I think those two recognized that a huge untapped majority of new readers out there were really hungry for truly original stories from creators who had complete control and ownership of their work, so I give them both all the credit for our book lasting long enough to have its own sweet deluxe edition.

The whole team is insanely proud of this hardcover, but if our first printing sells out, we probably won't have time to make more until after the holidays, so if you're cool enough to be thinking about getting this as a gift for someone you love, I'd encourage you to tell your friendly neighborhood retailer to hold onto one for you.
What was the selection process like for deciding what extras to publish?
Readers of our ongoing series know that we have a corny old-school letter column called "To Be Continued" at the end of each issue, and we wanted to do a special version of that in the back of the hardcover, one that answers just one piece of reader mail, which asked, "How do you guys make a "Saga?"'

And while I usually tackle the letter column by myself, we turned this edition into a really cool creator roundtable with Fiona, our mysterious letterer/designer Fonografiks and our "coordinator" Eric Stephenson. So we still give you all the exclusive behind-the-scenes sketches and script pages you usually get in these kinds of deluxe hardcovers, but this version also includes dozens of pages of detailed commentary about exactly how and why we all work together the way we do.

When I was lucky enough to write for major companies like Marvel and DC, I always had an army of editors, assistant editors, interns and countless other people helping to turn my script into a finished printed book. I never dreamed that I could make comics without the benefit of that vast infrastructure ... but it turns out that you can really make something that's every bit as professional-looking as a "mainstream" comic with only a small handful of very dedicated creators. It's a ton of work, and it's not for everybody, but if you're successful, you also get to keep all the profits that would normally go to funding that aforementioned vast infrastructure.

I still love the other comics companies out there that practically raised me, but with these hardcover extras, the whole "Saga" team wanted to give other creators out there who might be nervous about potentially making the leap to truly creator-owned books a step-by-step guide of how we do it almost every month, and how you can probably do it, too.
You include such great back and forth between you and Fiona as the issues develop. You mention how much you love her pencil/paper thumbnails more than anything - have you guys considered having a hand drawn issue without the digital pencils and inks?
Well, Fiona's the boss, so I'd be happy to write any kind of issue she wants to draw ... but as much as I adore her pencil thumbnails, I love her finished artwork even more. Fiona has completely convinced me that digital artwork can look every bit as warm and organic as traditional paper art, if not more so. Like anything, it's just a tool.
You'd mentioned to me some people had concerns about the cover. Can you tell me about that? What was your response?
"Saga" is really the story of just one character, Hazel, so Fiona and I discussed having each new hardcover feature an original image of Hazel at a different stage of her life. For this first collection covering Hazel's infancy, a breastfeeding image inspired by our very first cover seemed like a slam dunk, especially with the backdrop of Landfall and Wreath, two warring worlds that are actually as dependent on each other as Hazel is to her mother.

But Image warned us that we might get pushback from retailers and our distributors, especially because some stores out there have apparently already stopped displaying our first trade paperback because some customers complained about that comparatively tame image of Alana breastfeeding her baby. I think that's insane, especially given how many covers out there literally feature severed human heads, but so it goes.

Anyway, Eric Stephenson was concerned that we might be limiting our audience with this kind of cover, and we had a lot of back and forth with him until he finally said, "You guys know I'm not your boss, right? You can do anything you want at Image, I just wanted you to be aware of the climate out there." Which is one of the countless reasons why Image is the best publisher in the world.

And to Eric's credit, as soon as he saw Fiona's gorgeous execution of our cover idea, his response was the same as mine: "However many of these we print, it's not gonna be enough." Thankfully, retailers have been equally supportive, and we haven't had a single complaint. Sounds like one national book chain is even going to feature the hardcover at the front of their stores for the holiday season, so we're enormously grateful for everybody's approval of horned babies and milk-engorged boobs.
RELATED: SDCC First Look: Vaughan and Staples' "Saga" HC Cover Early on, you'd mentioned that a big inspiration for "Saga" was your own fatherhood. How does it feel when people react poorly to an expression of parenthood like Alana and Hazel's moment on the cover?
Oh, I don't take it personally. I happen to think breastfeeding is an amazing, beautiful thing, but I'd be lying if I said we didn't want to have a cover that would make all readers have an instantaneous emotional reaction, good or bad.

I totally accept that some readers out there will see the cover and think it's disturbing or perverted, but I don't think those kinds of people would like "Saga" anyway, so this cover is hopefully saving them fifty bucks.

We wanted to reach out to young parents, proud feminists and other potential new readers who crave something different and who would actually respond favorably to a cover like this. Those are the kinds of people we hope will discover "Saga" with this collection.
In the 18 issues collected in the hardcover, do you have a favorite? Or some favorite moments?
My own writing mostly makes me cringe, but I never get tired of looking at Fiona's art. Even some of the best comic artists out there only really have like five different expressions that their characters use, but Fiona has five million, and they're always perfect. Any panel with Izabel being fifty shades of sarcastic just makes me smile.
You and Fiona were both very hands-on about every detail of this collection. What were some of the most important things to you while planning it?
To be fair, as much work as Fiona and I put into this hardcover, it was nothing compared to how much was done by our tireless letterer/designer Fonografiks. He put so much effort into making sure that this wasn't just a beautiful package to have on your shelf, but also an oversized treatment of our art and story that readers could get in lost in for an entire weekend. He's the greatest.
I thought we could catch up a little on the current arc that just ended. Your scripts have such a natural flow and reveal just the right amounts of information - at the start of this arc, you shared more about the war between Landfall, Wreath and the Robot Kingdom. Although you only give a brief overview, is the history behind the story in "Saga" something you have thought out all of the details on?
I have, and it's definitely something we'll be exploring in more detail in our very next issue. That said, I've always thought that war is as important to our story as it was to the movie "Casablanca." Which is to say, it matters a lot, but not nearly as much as the lives of the ordinary people at the forefront of the story matter.
In less political news, the war between Marko and Alana wages on as of #24. When we last saw them, they were separated and each facing off against their own enemies. What are each of their priorities right now? And was this separation something you'd planned, or did the characters naturally come to this point as the story developed?
Marko and Alana's separation is something I'd been planning from the very beginning, and I'll just say that anyone hoping it will be resolved quickly or easily is in for a lot more heartbreak with this next arc.
The tension between them feels so real. Is there anything from your personal relationships working itself out on the pages?
Are you asking if my wife and I are separated now? Because I'm happy to report that she has not left me yet. But yeah, everything in "Saga" is somehow inspired by some aspect of my own personal experiences, even if it's been highly fictionalized in the translation.

Some people thought that Alana joining the costumed "Open Circuit" was my commentary on superhero comics, but I love those books, and don't really have much to say about them. For me, the Open Circuit was more about processing my own difficulties trying to balance a career in television while also being a new father.

I think Fiona and I are both usually pretty sympathetic to Alana and her challenges trying to provide for her family, so we were surprised that a lot of readers seemed so critical of her last arc, while seemingly giving Marko a pass for some of his less noble actions. It'll be interesting to see if those perspectives shift at all with this next storyline.
As a reader I see Baby Hazel on the page and I'm reading Narrator Hazel from some point in the future - I feel like I know Narrator Hazel but I actually don't, she's a mystery. What are some of the challenges of writing a viewpoint character that your readers haven't truly met yet?
No challenges, only joy. Fiona and I know exactly what Narrator Hazel looks like, and I know exactly how old she is and exactly what she's experienced by the time she's telling this tale.

I think some people worried that having Hazel narrate the story from some point in the future would take away a lot of the drama, since we at least know that she's going to survive... but by only selectively revealing what she wants to share when she wants to share it, I hope Hazel has proven that she knows how to spin a pretty gripping yarn.
What are you most looking forward to in the upcoming arc?
New characters designed by Fiona, strange new worlds, and Lying Cat and friends embarking on an epic quest for dragon sperm.

What more could you ask for from a twenty-fifth issue, other than no gimmicky variants, and a badass wraparound cover from Fiona Staples at no extra cost? See you in February!
"Saga" Volume One Hardcover is available now. "Saga" #25 hits stores

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Brian K. Vaughan On the Expanding Universe of "Saga"

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This week, comic shop shelves got a little heavier with the release of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' luminous hardcover edition of "Saga." Combining the first three arcs with loads of delicious extras, this edition is a stunning reflection of the collaboration between its creators: detailed, thoughtful and mischievous.

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Writers in any medium would kill for a creative streak as long as Brian K. Vaughan's. He started scripting comics in the late 1990s, burst into the industry's top tier a few years later, and hasn't exited the spotlight since. In the aughts, he won widespread acclaim and a rack of awards for inventive stories like Y: The Last Man (which imagined a world where all men abruptly died, except for the protagonist), Ex Machina (about a superpowered mayor of New York City), and Runaways (in which a group of kids finds out their parents are supervillains and go on the lam).

After those all wrapped up, he moved on to one of the best series currently in publication, the quirky space opera Saga (penciled by Fiona Staples), and filled out his slate with a story about a futuristic Canadian-American war called We Stand on Guard (penciled by Steve Skroce) and his latest title, the surreal sci-fi thriller Paper Girls. Oh, and he also wrote for the TV shows Lost and Under the Dome. He's been busy.

With the latest collection of Saga hitting stands today, we caught up with Vaughan to talk about the injustices of the comics industry, his theories about the popularity of comics adaptations, and why he's writing more stories about people who aren't straight, white men.

What's your average day like?It begins much earlier than I would like, because I have two young children. I walk them to school every day, and then I'm kind of a Johnny Lunchpail: I write during normal working hours, from 9 to 6, which is very strange, because when I started out I would write from, like, midnight to 8 a.m. and then just sleep all day like a vampire. That's how I prefer to write, so it's strange adjusting to these normal-people hours. I'm trying my best.

You recently sent a tweet that triggered a lot of discussion: "Comics are a billion-dollar industry built on the backs of largely poor creators who are discouraged from ever learning their true worth." What prompted that?I'd been thinking about alternate covers. This is getting pretty inside-baseball, but it's something that's really affecting comics now: A lot of books come out and they might have six or seven alternate covers, and sometimes there will be a cover for which a retailer will have to order 100 copies of the books to get one of these special covers. I think I was just asking, Are the artists drawing all these alternate covers at least getting paid more for it? I think the companies are all benefiting spectacularly from just one new image on top of a book.

It's always frustrating to hear from comics creators who are like, "Ah, there's no money in comics, and it's an honor just to be working on them." I guess I disagree with that. There's a lot of money in comics and the comics companies have been doing better and better over the years, but it seems like, for most artists, page rates have stagnated or gone down. I'd like to see more creators fighting for what's fair, and not just taking what they're given.

You're focusing on artists; do you think they get a rawer deal than writers? Oh, definitely. But if you're looking for who's treated unfairly in comics, you could start with letterers. They're probably the most criminally underpaid creators in the industry. But yeah, I think it's always harder for artists. Their job is several times more difficult than a writer's. It's physically demanding and it just takes more time. For a page that a writer could dash off in an hour, it's gonna be a day or two of an artist's life, and I think they've always been taken for granted. Especially because the people who write about comics are usually writers themselves, so it's natural for them to focus on that side, but comics is a visual medium. The artists should be getting the lion's share of the attention and ownership and benefits, and that's not always the case.

So what kinds of fixes do you think could happen in the industry to make it more equitable and fair for creators? Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Valiant - they're all excellent places to work, but the characters they own need the creators more than the creators need them. So if you're a creator and you think you deserve a raise, ask for one. Otherwise, maybe, bet on yourself and go creator-owned. There's no guarantee you'll succeed in that world, but even a modest hit can be life-changing.

Do you go back and read many of your older books?Oh, God, no. I now have enough distance from a lot of my work that, if I see someone bring up an X-Men issue [that I wrote] to sign, I can flip through it and it doesn't completely feel like I'm drowning or being set on fire. But for the most part, no, I would much rather read other people's writing than my own.

It really feels that bad with all of your old stuff?I miss the artists and I miss that collaboration and that time, but I just see my mistakes and failings. Or worse, you see something and you're like, Fuck, that was great - oh no, what if I peaked back in 2003? This is a nightmare! There is no good that comes from dwelling on your own stuff. You just gotta be like a shark and keep moving forward.

Speaking of 2003, your big hits of the aughts, Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, were produced in the wake of 9/11. How did that influence them?Yeah, they're so much a product of their time. The first issue of Y, I wrote before 9/11 and [artist] Pia [Guerra] was in the middle of it when 9/11 happened. Y was a lot more dour beforehand. Living in New York during and after 9/11, you just saw how much people wanted to be together to drink and make jokes and screw around. I guess it was the only way to not go insane. Y got infused with that gallows humor and the balancing of comedy and tragedy.

Ex Machina was about trying to make sense of the world after watching from the roof of my apartment in Brooklyn as these buildings fell, and trying to make sense of politics and this concept of heroism and whether that's a real thing or just something we impose on people. That was all born right out of that day.

What's the status of the Y: The Last Man film adaptation?
It's actually over at FX right now, so it's a television series. It's very slowly coming to life. No news I can share, other than that it's all chugging along happily.

Your recent work is garnering even more attention than your old stuff. Saga has become a gateway drug for people who don't usually read comics. Was that a goal when you started the series?Yeah. Since I broke into comics, I've always loved converting people. I remember being a freshman at NYU and getting that first issue of Preacher and just watching it spread like an STD around the dorm. It didn't matter if you were a man, woman, whatever your background was, people just loved Preacher. You didn't have to understand a complicated layout or anything. If you'd only ever read the Sunday comics, this Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon storytelling was so clear. It sucked you in. So yeah, I've always wanted Saga to reach beyond the base of comics lovers and reach out to the vast majority of people who don't yet know that they love comics.

When did people start telling you, "I'm not a comics reader, but I love SagaIt happened right away. With Y: The Last Man, it was a more gradual process. When our first collection came out, there would be guys that would drag their girlfriends up at signings, and the girls would say, "This is the first comic that I ever read," and by the end of Y: The Last Man, it would be women dragging their boyfriends up, and the guys would be like, "This is the first comic I ever read." It felt like that sea change already happened during Y, that the audience already started to reach parity between male and female readers for certain kinds of books.

But yeah, it was right away with Saga, and I think a lot of that is a credit to Fiona. This is a weird book. There's a lot of bizarre, tough-to-swallow shit and Fiona makes it so accessible and inviting. So many people have come up and said, "I saw that first cover for the first issue of the first collection, and said, 'I have to see what's going on.'" You turn to that first page and Fiona just sucks you in.

The core cast of your other new ongoing series, Paper Girls, is comprised of young women, and you've won praise for Saga's lack of straight, white males. Do you think creators have a responsibility to be inclusive? I just feel like artists have a responsibility to be good. That said, I think it's much harder to be good without trying to reflect some aspect of the real world, and the real world has never been just a straight, white guy world. It's certainly becoming increasingly less like that all the time. So yeah, it's just not something that I wanna write about.

You're known for your final pages: Any given issue is likely to end with a full-page panel depicting some twist or revelation. When did you start consciously doing that?I think I was probably influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It didn't just have great cliffhangers every episode; it had great cliffhangers every commercial break. And they weren't what I later learned in television are called "schmuck bait," which is an easy cliffhanger where it's like, you put a knife to Buffy's throat and cut to commercial. That's schmuck bait because everyone knows that Buffy's not gonna get stabbed and die when the show comes back.

The goal is to create an emotional moment that's so strong that you're gonna hold on for a little bit. That's just necessary in any serialized storytelling. I think that challenged me to know that the end of an issue is a responsibility. Why the fuck should a reader care about this for another 15 minutes, much less another month to come back for it? You try to end in the strongest way possible.

If you could strike the right deal and make sure the artist was gonna be taken care of, would you go back to Marvel or DC to do a superhero book? Or are you done with that in your life? I think it's done. I was lucky enough to get to write Batman and Spider-Man and all these characters that I loved from my childhood. But I've always been happiest making new things rather than just trying to interpret other people's creations. There are a lot better, younger, hungrier creators out there who have good stories to tell with those characters.

What can comics do as a medium that filmed entertainment can't?It all comes down to money. Every medium is a struggle between art versus commerce, and if you work in film and television, commerce is always the first thing that you think about and art the last thing that you think about. It's always hanging over your head. But comics is a small enough medium that you can afford to put art first. You can't not think about the commerce, it just gets to be secondary. You start off saying, "What is the coolest thing?" If you wanna do a double-page spread that features 300 characters, you don't have to think about budgetary constraints. It almost baffles me that people are so concerned about comics being adapted into a TV show or a movie, as though it means comics are just a glorified blueprint for something else.

Well, comics are serving as jumping-off points for an ever-growing number of adaptations. There's been an insane boom in the past decade. Why do you think that is? I think people are now realizing that over the last couple of decades comics have been this incubator of pure imagination. It was this place where people were able to do whatever kind of stories they wanted, without having to worry about budgets. People are crazy if they're talking about the comic-book bubble bursting. That's never gonna happen any more than people are gonna stop adapting novels. That is here to stay.

There's also the generational factor: People who read more ambitious, cinematic comics like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, or Maus in the 1980s are now making decisions at studios.
When I first came out [to Los Angeles] however many years ago, it was all interns who were nerds. The guy or girl who would bring you a water as you were sitting in the hallway would be like, "I'm such a huge comic person and I love this or that," and then you would go and meet with people who had no idea who you were or what you were talking about. Years later, all those interns became assistants, and they're in a position now where they can force stuff on their bosses. Then they move their way up, and it feels like now all those people are second-in-commands at companies. We're just a few years away from the geeks having completely taken over and running everything.

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Comics Writer Brian K. Vaughan Talks Saga, Diversity, and Fixing Injustice in the Industry

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Writers in any medium would kill for a creative streak as long as Brian K. Vaughan's. He started scripting comics in the late 1990s, burst into the industry's top tier a few years later, and hasn't exited the spotlight since.