Love in the time of Saga

Marko and Alana with baby in tow prepare to fight for their lives in Saga.

What do you get when you take Romeo and Juliet, give them a newborn child, place them in the middle of an endless galactic war and toss in bounty hunters, sex slaves, and royal robots with television heads?  No, not an acid tinged version of Star Wars, even with the bounty hunters; instead you get the Comic series known as Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughn and published by Image.  A friend of mine bought me Volume One as a Christmas gift and I blew through it in a flash.  Right out of the gate I found it immensely compelling.  What initially seemed like a traditional story of forbidden love between people from warring races turned out to be much deeper than that.  At it's core the series seems to be about bringing something to life in the midst of countless destruction and death.
This is how Saga begins: Alana, a winged woman from the planet Landfall and Marko, her horned husband from Landfall's only moon Wreath, have a child.  As you've hopefully surmised by now, the Landfallians and their moon neighbor have been engaged in centuries of warfare that has been outsourced to other planets in the galaxy as a way to avoid destruction on Landfall and Wreath.  The inhabitants of these other unfortunate planets are forced to take sides in the ongoing conflict.  The series is narrated by Alana and Marko's fully grown daughter as she recounts her forbidden birth on the muddy planet Cleave where her parents are hiding from freelance bounty hunters as well as their own kind.  Right from the beginning you realize that although there are aliens, bounty hunters and a galactic war raging, Saga is nothing like Star Wars or anything else for that matter.  What captured me initially was the straightforward dialogue which made the characters seem instantly relatable; they're aliens yet they talk and express themselves like humans.  In the first few pages we learn pretty much everything we need to know about the ongoing struggle and how both Alana and Marko fought for their respective sides before meeting and running away together.
Another interesting aspect of the series is how it manages to make some of the strangest concepts seem plausible within the galaxy of the story.  Early on we meet a robot prince, aptly named Prince Robot IV, with a television for a head who's working with the Landfallian's to track down the fugitive parents.  What's funny is how they write this character as if he were a real person: we see him having sex with his girlfriend and taking a shit like a regular joe.  Likewise, Marko and Alana although clearly in love, occasionally bicker back and forth as they try to get their newborn daughter off Cleave and out of harm's way.  
We soon meet a bounty hunter named The Will who's been hired by the Horns to track down and kill the refugees and their mistake and we catch up with him at various points in his search.  Accompanying The Will is an animal called Lying Cat, who surprise, surprise can tell when people are lying.  The first volume recounts Alana and Marko's struggles to get off Cleave by traveling to a place called the Rocketship forest.  Yep, that's right, a forest of wooden rocket-ships growing out of the ground.  Elements like this which might seem ridiculous actually seem to fit right into the bizarre yet oddly familiar world of Saga.  On their way to the Rocketship forest, Alana and Marko fall asleep in the woods and awake surrounded by all manner of scary creatures.  One of them is a female bounty hunter called The Stalk, a half woman, half arachnid beauty with eight eyes and no shortage of weapons to kill our main characters.  I should also mention that The Stalk is topless.  The artwork of Saga, by Fiona Staples, is immensely pleasing to the eye; detailed yet clean.  Some of the full page panels look more like paintings than drawings and the style emphasizes the physicality of the action without feeling messy or cluttered.
The story's many subplots are well balanced, showing individuals on both sides of the conflict gunning for Marko and Alana.  We follow The Will as he traverses the galaxy in search of them.  One of the most interesting subplots occurs when he visits Sextillion, a planet sized brothel full of kinky alien sex.  Saga leaves very little to the imagination and it's clear that almost nothing was off limits for the creators.  It's awesome to see such creative freedom in a comic book.  Still, at it's core, Saga is a compelling story of two people risking everything to be together to bring an idea, represented in Alana and Marko's daughter, into a ravaged world.  "This is how an idea becomes real," we read as their child is born in the very first panel.  Like all great creative works, Saga is an idea, a unique and fascinating idea, coming to life completely unfettered on the page in glorious detail.  As of now I've just finished Volume 2 and eagerly await the next volume to continue following Alana and Marko as they travel the galaxy.