Saga vol. 12

The last time we saw Alana, Hazel, and Squire, they were barely making ends meet on a planet full of poor refugees.  Now they’re living the (relatively) better life as employees in a third-rate space circus!  Flop-sweat spouting MCs.  Show dolphins with explosive diarrhea.  Angry clowns who will sell you out for a buck.  Carnies who make sure all of the games are rigged.  This place has it all!  It even has new friends for Alana and Hazel, but not Squire as he’s got problems that friendship or family won’t be able to fix on their own.

One of the great things about this series is that it’s never certain how things are going to go for the main cast.  Even when the overall thrust is that things are either going better or worse for Alana and her kids, something else happens along the way to balance it out.  That’s true here as well and it results in some genuine surprises as the volume goes on.  Unless your name is The Will.  In which case you can expect his life to go further down the drain in each installment of this series, something which is as true (and predictable) here as it has ever been.

Still, this is one of the brighter volumes of the series, and the end-of-volume twist that dominates the final issue feels more interesting for all of the changes it portends.  It also indicates that two of this installment’s more interesting characters, spider-girl Emesis and very friendly circus chef Feld, are going to be sticking around for the near-term at least.  If nothing else, they make a good enough first impression here that I’ll be sad if  writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples decide to brutally kill them off in the next volume or later.  Which is arguably the best compliment I could pay them right now.