“…the friends and even acquaintances my family left in our wake continued risking their lives to take care of me.
What the hell did I ever do to deserve them?”
Keep reading for a review of Saga #64.
Some spoilers below.
We open the issue with a view of Special Agent Gale and ohhhhh my goodness he looks like he’s seen some shit. His eyes are just dead. Once again, Brian and Fiona can present us with these horrible people that you just hate, and somehow make us feel sorry for them. Gale is a complete douchebag but he’s only on this mission because the Powers That Be have promised to murder everyone he loves if he doesn’t track down Alana, and I’m sure he wants all of this to be over.
(My prediction: when he finally gives his bosses what they want he’ll have one brief second of relief followed by one second of horror when he realizes his throat’s just been cut. No way he gets out of this alive.)
Anyway, he’s definitely getting closer to Alana because he’s chatting with one of the band members from the pirate ship (who should take up a career in acting because every word out of his mouth seemed believable, even Gale bought it.) Gale takes off on what I hope is a wild goose chase.
Speaking of wild goose chases, Hazel is still processing the fact that her gentle little adopted brother Squire just annihilated the guard cat at the warehouse. He then shocks the hell out of her and me with his next act, which I’m not going to spoil, but it surprised me more than the violence.
As much as Squire surprised me, what surprised and bothered me was how Hazel behaved. I know seeing Squire kill the guard cat was probably a shock, but as soon as a cop shows up Hazel throws Squire under the bus. I can’t imagine he’s going to forget that.
Meanwhile, Alana is still trying to find a way off planet, and while she’s desperate enough to take any chance, seeing someone defend his daughter makes her think a slightly-safer-than-usual opportunity may have arrived.
And then we have a scene that ties into the scene with Hazel and Squire, you could call the theme “like mother like daughter, like father like son.” We learn a little more about Petrichor’s family, and knowing what we do about her, it makes perfect sense.
I bet most people figured this out before I did, but Petrichor’s native language is Esperanto. I love that. And when I typed Petrichor’s Mom’s words into an Esperanto-to-Google translator, at first I thought she said “happy marriage.” Turns out, you have to have the little mark over the c in “časado,” she actually says “happy hunting.”
We jump from there back to Hazel and Squire and the cop, and everything the cop tells them seems legit. I really hope he’s not lying. Squire, at least, isn’t convinced, and things are about to get Very Bad Very Quickly.
I’ve been assuming that Squire wanted to go on this crazy plan because Hazel would love to have her father back, and Squire is in love with Hazel (I haven’t forgotten about that one plotline nuh UH.) But with Squire’s recent changes I wonder if his reasons are more personal than that.
Finally we see Alana make a deal with the circus owner, but she’s on a much tighter deadline than she was expecting, and she has no idea what Hazel and Squire have been up to. If they make this deadline it’s going to be very tight. Of course the issue ends on a cliffhanger. Brian says in the afterwards “Ugh, ticking clocks stress me out.” Me too.
The art, of course, is lovely. Some of my favorite images this week were Petrichor walking out of the glowing portal; her mother saying “Mia koro”; the first panel of Agent Gale with his dead, dead eyes; and even landscape panels like the one of the giant circus tent are gorgeous. (Not to mention the final panel showing the planet they’re on. That’s just amazing.)