The series’s ethos and stunning quality has led to widespread acclaim: Saga has collected a staggering 12 Eisner Awards (essentially the Oscars for comic books). As a result, Saga is filled with well-rooted plotlines that engage organically with the characters’ arcs and with tricky topics such as pacifism and abortion. The constant violence these characters face forces them to make painful choices, and though they sometimes make grave mistakes, Staples and Vaughan don’t demonize them. Saga relies on a stable of heroes, antiheroes, and villains who span the spectra of age, class, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why? David A. (One arc even takes place in an area that resembles an American middle-class suburb, complete with trampolines and jungle gyms.)

Despite the magic and spacecraft, Vaughan writes and Staples inks to life a universe that looks, in many ways, like our own. Former enemies turn into reluctant allies, and then beloved family members. (Issue #50 is out this week.) Characters who might seem like one-note tropes-the jilted ex, the jaded gun-for-hire-become far more complicated. Vaughan have lent humanity to their entire ensemble. Yet over the dozens of issues released since Saga’s 2012 debut, co-creators Fiona Staples and Brian K. The story begins with Alana, Marko, and their newborn daughter, Hazel-a taboo, inter-species refugee family fleeing the intergalactic war between their home worlds. In short, Saga can seem bewildering but at its core are simpler themes of love, loss, and growth. In one scene, readers meet an assassin with the armless body of Venus de Milo when she casts aside her skirt, she reveals the abdomen of a spider and eight legs clutching different weapons. And there’s a drunken cyclops who writes trashy romance novels, but may secretly be the galaxy’s leading intellectual. There’s a queer, disemboweled ghost who works nights as a sassy teenage babysitter. There’s a telepathic, bald cat who yowls “LYING” at people who don’t tell the truth. Image Comics’ space-opera comic-book series Saga imagines a vast universe with strange inhabitants.

Saga, Volume 6 by Brian K. Vaughan