The acclaimed hit Image Comics series, Saga, will be taking a break of at least a year as creators Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan look to “creatively recharge” before finishing the epic, well, saga, of their heroes, Alana and Marko, and their daughter Hazel.
The upcoming break was announced in the letters column of this week’s Saga #54, which completes the series’ ninth storyline. Since the 12-time Eisner Award-winning series launched in 2012, every six issues consists of a story arc and then the creators would take a three month break before picking up again with the next arc. This time around, though, the break will be much longer.
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In the column, Vaughan explained:
“After fifty-four issues and over 1,200 consecutive pages of sequential storytelling together, Fiona and I have decided to take an extended break before we eventually reunite with Saga #55. And unlike our usual three months of ‘Vacationanza’ between arcs, we plan to pause publication of this series for at least the next year.
This obviously wasn’t a decision we took lightly, but Fiona and I feel a responsibility to keep making the very best comic we can, and we both agreed that he only way to eventually finish the epic saga we set out to tell was with this one significant… let’s call it… Intermission!”
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Vaughan further noted that the intermission will allow them to “creatively recharge (and to reconnect with our non-fictional families)”
Besides being one of the most critically acclaimed comic books in the industry, Saga is also one of Image’s best-selling titles after The Walking Dead, so the loss of the series for over a year is significant. It is also interesting to note that Staples and Vaughan have both worked on multiple other projects during their production of Saga, with Staples launching the Archie reboot with Mark Waid for Archie Comics in 2015 and Vaughan launching many titles since Saga began, including Paper Girls with Cliff Chiang, We Stand on Guard with Steve Skroce and both The Private Eye and Barrier with Marcos Martin. Therefore, the fact that they now need over a year to “recharge” speaks a lot to how much work they put into their series.
Earlier this year, Vaughan noted that they were not even halfway through the series, so it sounds like this saga might go on past 100 issues, which is great news for comic book fans. We will just have to wait a little bit longer to get to that 100th issue.
Saga #54 is out this Wednesday.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter).