A Foolish Inconsistency: The Saga of 'Saga'
"Comics," a wise newspaper features editor once opined, back when the Earth had not yet cooled and icthyosaurs swam the turbid seas, "Aren't Just For Kids Anymore."
Her fellow editors, incredulous, seized upon this audacious truth. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!," they intoned, seized with an evangelical fervor. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" Their cry rang out throughout the land, in metropolitan dailies and weekly newsmagazines, in pennysavers and morning heralds and advocates and argusi. Sometime in the late Mesozoic, it was taken up by a new breed of editors who appended to it a prefix that testified to their surpassing wit and insight.
"Pow!" they said. "Zap!" they said. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!"
But then the day came when those words lost their power. When suddenly the truth they contained was no longer audacious, but self-evident. Flatly, mundanely, dully so.
And so it went for years. There were comics for and about kids. There were comics for and about adults. And some of those comics for and about adults were about very very sexy adults. And some of those comics for and about adults were about very very violent adults.
Saga, the hugely successful Image comic written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples, is a comic for adults, about adults to whom many sexy things happen, and many violent things happen.
We have told you, in this space, that is a good comic — no, a great comic — for adults to enjoy. Witty, warm, hugely imaginative, sad, funny, gorgeous to look at, ingeniously plotted, with something to say about love and marriage and honor and robots with televisions for heads.
On Tuesday, writer Brian K. Vaughan said Apple would not be allowing Saga #12, which goes on sale today, to be downloaded via iPad and iPhone. The reason, according to Vaughan: "two postage-sized images of gay sex."
This, of course, simply posed an inconvenience to a relatively small number of people. As Vaughan pointed out, there were several workarounds available to those who normally read Saga on Apple devices:
1) Head over to your friendly neighborhood comics shop and pick up a physical copy of our issue that you can have and hold forever.
2) While you're at it, don't forget to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps protect retailers who are brave enough to carry work that some in their communities might consider offensive. You can find signed copies of Saga at the CBLDF site right now.
3) Download the issue directly through sites like https://comics.imagecomics.com or on your non-Apple smartphone or tablet.
4) If all else fails, you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple's iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?