“Oh, do forgive me, dear girl. I just meant, sooner or later, we all learn a very hard lesson.
Loyalty is a fucking fairy tale.”
The six-month hiatus is over! Keep reading for a review of Saga #61.
Spoilers below!
When we last saw Hazel and her little family, they’d just lost their entire freaking home: a sentient spaceship tree that was really like one of the family, and also one of Hazel’s last ties to her dead father.
Fast forward six months (I love it when the same time passes for the characters as it does for us, it makes everything feel even more grounded) and we find that the planet Hazel and her family are stranded on have been pulled into the same useless war as the rest of the galaxy, great.
Vaughan doesn’t always feel the need to have the same theme for every story in an issue, but it feels like the theme of this one could be “some things are more important than just ‘being happy’.”
Gwendolyn wakes up from a dream about Marko when Sophie finds her in bed with The Will. Despite being grossed out, Sophie’s biggest concern is that she hopes Gwendolyn is at least happy? Gwen talks about the families she’s had to call because one of their children died in the war, and how she’ll never be happy till she doesn’t have to do that anymore.
Of course, Lying Cat is right there, so that was all a side step, probably to spare The Will’s feelings. Of course Gwen’s not happy. Her feelings about Marko run bone deep: it’s not enough that he’s dead, she wants his whole family dead, and she’s willing to work with the Robots (even though they’re not usually anywhere close to the same side) and sleep with The Will (even though she’s married and once punched Will in the face for kissing her) to get what she wants. Happiness, like loyalty, is terribly overrated.
There’s a tiny moment where someone is complaining to their son about how the pretty bartender dissed them, the cruise ship they’re on is cheap, the wi-fi is terrible, and retirement sucks, so for some people happiness is more of a choice than an outcome, and nobody’s going to feel sorry for them when an assassin takes them prisoner, I’m just saying.
Meanwhile Alana has taken a soul-sucking job in a factory (I may be reading too much into it but it sure sounded like an Amazon job) just to keep Hazel and Squire alive, but she doesn’t complain about it even once. I think it just breaks her heart that her children have to live like this, she’s not going to compound it by giving in to what has to be crushing grief about her husband, her home, and all her dreams. Who cares if she’s happy? She’s surviving, and so’s her family, that’s all that’s important.
Of course, there’s got to be a very thin layer of calm on top of all that grief, and I’m wondering if we’ll ever see what her immediate reaction was to those tragedies. We had one brief look of devastation on her face when the wolf-doctor asked about her husband, but will we get a flashback of the moment she found his body? What is she like when she’s not putting on a brave face for this kids? I’m betting it’s gut-wrenchingly awful of course.
And on that note, what if someone holds out a solution to her, like someone did in the end of this issue? Will she go for it? Will she give up her ring, one of the last things she has of Marko’s? (And, I almost forgot, it’s one of the rings Gwendolyn gave him before he left for the war; what’s she going to do if she sees Alana wearing it?)
I’m calling it right now, there’s no way this little solution works. I think Alana’s going to go for it (Hazel’s for sure going to make her go for it) and it’s going to make everything just horrible, because Brian K. Vaughan likes to rip our hearts out, and he’s very, very good at it.
As for the art, what can I say that I haven’t already said a million times, Fiona Staples knocks it out of the park as always. Whether it’s a young Marko proposing to Gwen, Hazel’s shocked face seen through a beaded curtain, or a cruise ship shaped like a giant Polaroid camera (seriously!) there’s plenty of lovely images to linger over.
