Saga and the Revolutionary Power of the Opposite of War

Comic books are a vast medium.  Every genre you can imagine can be found between the covers of one comic or another.  While often seen solely as the setting of superhero stories, there are horror comics, memoir comics, true crime comics, comic adaptations of classic literature, fantasy comics, sci-fi comics, comic adaptations of films, YA comics, comics about history, comics which continue the runs of favorite TV shows, and on and on.  The comic medium truly has something for everyone.  And, as someone who’s loved comic books for nearly forty years, I don’t care about any of those other stories XD.  I’m sorry!  But I don’t!  Bring me my superheroes!  I have novels and movies and TV shows and short story collections and memoirs and nonfiction books for all those other experiences.  When I open a comic book, I want my Marvel heroes, my DC heroes, and nothing else.  Except Saga.  I want Saga.  I want all the Saga.  Saga is the brilliant, blazing, beautiful exception to my rule!  With sixty issues released and forty-eight still to come, Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Fiona Staples (artist) have created a masterpiece of love, family, loss, trauma, trial, and healing…while also telling one of the most poignant antiwar stories I’ve ever read.

Netflix, Amazon, Hulu…And My Exhaustion With Streaming Shows

To be upfront at the start, this is going to be a First World Problem lamentation.  But it’s been on my mind a lot lately and two factors – the sitcom Scrubs and a recent conversation with Jeff – have led me to finally write this post.  So here it is folks, we live in an age where (for those of us with the means and possibility of access) we have thousands of shows and thousands of movies available to be streamed whenever our little hearts’ desire…and I’m kind of exhausted by it all.  I am.  More and more I find myself missing the “old days,” when a TV show was on once a week and you either saw it, caught it in reruns, or it was forever lost to you.  Sure, I missed a lot.  But what I caught I caught because I loved it.

Top Five Wednesday – Settings

Admittedly, I’ve only been doing this Top Five Wednesday thing for three weeks now but this one proved a little bit challenging for me.  The good folks who run the Official T5W Group over at Goodreads said we were to write about the top five settings we wanted to see more of.  They could be time periods, places, real, fictitious, etc.  What made this hard is, upon reflection, I learned that the setting is rarely what draws me to a story, let alone makes me fall in love with it.  For example, I love New York City but I won’t read a book or see a film just because it’s set there.  And few books or movies make the city as central a part of it as, say, Begin Again did (which, if you haven’t seen, you should check it out NOW – it’s beautiful).  So it’s not the setting that I love but rather what the author does with the story and the characters they choose to place in that setting.  But!  I wasn’t going to throw in the towel!  So, after some careful consideration, here are the five settings I’d like to see more of.