Mechanics of a Moment: Saga #14

Saga, an Image Comics series by Brian L. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, is without a doubt my favorite comic book series and perhaps even my favorite work of fiction in general, and when I began my reread of the series recently I couldn’t wait to get to issue #14. This issue has my favorite moment in not just the series, but in any comic ever, and I thought I’d take some time to expunge my thoughts over what makes this moment so great. The page below demonstrates the power that great art and even just a single word have to enrich and communicate.

This single page is worth framing in gold. We have a wordless panel with two characters—Sophie and Lying Cat—lying in the grass of this idyllic alien world with The Will’s fun and organic-looking ship in the background. Sophie was sold into sex slavery by her own family, and she was assaulted and abused before she was rescued by The Will, Lying Cat, and Gwendolyn. This page is the first time we get to see Sophie being herself without being surrounded by the "adults", so to speak. Lying Cat is seemingly asleep and there’s nobody else around. Sophie’s name before The Will rescued her was Slave Girl and she had no identity outside of those who abused her. Here, Sophie is learning how to be herself. She’s reciting facts about herself, trying to make herself real in her own eyes. The facts she rattles off—the specificity of her favorite color being “blue-green” makes her feel so real—are sweet and heartwarming.

Then comes the last two panels. Sophie pivots, her expression turns into one of guilt, and she proclaims that she must be all dirty on the inside because of what was done to her. But before she can even finish, the half-asleep Lying Cat uses her lie-detecting abilities to say that Sophie is lying. And the page ends on a beautiful panel of Sophie, a huge smile on her face and her arms wrapped around Lying Cat.

There are so many reasons why this moment stands out for me, why it makes me want to tear up not just in awe of its diegetic beauty but in the beauty of its own artistry. In a series filled with massive battle scenes, alien orgies, self-fellatioing dragons, and all sorts of other zany and wonderful moments, I think it’s the stark quietness of this moment that makes it shine. There is no plot movement here. There is no development of The Will’s search for both Prince Robot IV and Hazel, but the creative team had the genius to create a page like this. It would have been easy to write this page off in the planning process because it doesn’t further the plot, but this moment furthers the character of Sophie as well as the very soul of the comic more than any other page that could have taken its place. Sophie is a character who we instantly feel sympathy for the moment we meet her but this moment makes you want to just fight the whole universe for her.

The panel in which Sophie begins to say she is dirty and then Lying Cat cuts her off is so amazing because it pulls the reader between two emotions in the same beat of dialogue. When Sophie begins to speak, the reader feels their heartbreak. They feel empathetic tears well up in the eyes but before Sophie can even finish Lying Cat makes it all okay in just one word. And suddenly the reader’s heart isn't just healed, it is elevated. The tears the reader has are turned into happy ones. We must also look at the art specifically in this panel. The way Sophie bows her head speaks so much volume— and so does the half-asleep expression of Lying Cat. Lying Cat isn’t trying to necessarily make Sophie feel better—she’s just speaking facts. If any other character said the same thing to Sophie, she wouldn't have believed them nearly as much because Lying Cat can't lie. If Lying Cat says she isn’t ruined, then it is true. In just one image and hardly a sentence, Vaughan and Staples carry the reader through a massive fall and rise of emotion that is just so masterful.

Beyond that particular panel, the art of the entire page is just delightful. The coloring of Staples’s art is phenomenal, and the environment in the page’s establishing shot pulls the eye into the beauty of the page. Lying Cat never opening her eyes once throughout the page shows just how earnest she is being. Sophie’s shifting expressions follow the reader's feelings, and that final smile Sophie has on her face when she hugs Lying Cat is enough to make a grown man cry (it’s me, I’m grown man). Staples is a master storyteller, able to incorporate so much detail and shading and line work into her pieces without her art ever becoming too busy or too hard on the eyes. The characters always pop against the backgrounds without feeling like they’ve been photoshopped in due to Staple's careful process of painting the backgrounds herself. Staples always conveys such a wide range of expressions in such few lines, and this page is no exception.

Another reason I love this page is that it operates solely within the context of the story. To readers who are not familiar with the context of the story, the impact of the scene is not there. There is no knowledge of Sophie’s past and there is no knowledge of the weight and truth that Lying Cat’s words carry. Heck, there isn’t any explanation for why this little girl is laying against a giant blue cat with a weird spaceship that looks like a turnip parked in the background behind them. This scene works so well because of the excellent worldbuilding that preceded it. Vaughan is an excellent world builder, always alluding to a larger world beyond the surface, as well as injecting information organically into the story. When Vaughan introduces concepts, they go beyond just their initial ingenuity or quirkiness. Lying Cat is a fun idea for a character and Vaughan never ceases to experiment and play with the applications of Lying Cat’s abilities. On Sextillion, Vaughan plays Lying Cat’s abilities for laughs, and in this issue, Lying Cat is used for a deep, heart-prodding character moment. In Saga, Vaughan and Staples have created a rich sandbox of characters that seems so strange and inaccessible from the outside but in reality, is comfortably subversive.

This moment between Sophie and the Lying Cat is, to me, the best moment in any comic book. Vaughan and Staples accomplished so much in such little page space and so few words. In the beauty and context of this moment, Vaughan and Staples flexed their mastery over the medium of the comic book, using limited page space, wonderful art, and contextual dialogue to create a moment that is as heartbreaking as it is heartwarming. I wish that every comic creator, whether they be a writer or an illustrator or a letter, inker, or colorist, would study this page because this is the work of creators at their best.

Saga: Compendium One is available on Amazon.