Posted in: Comics | Tagged: brian k baughan, fiona staples, image, Saga #15

Is This Week's Saga Hinting It's High Art Because It's Like a Board Game?

It's just a thought but not one entirely without basis. This week's issue of Saga (#15), like many issues, has low-key hints at the place of the arts in culture and often picks out the things we don't usually think of as culturally significant as the possible backbone of our human experience of the arts. It's a foundational thing in the series considering that a Romance novel ends up being a universe-changing social treatise in disguise.

*[Sorry, folks, this is a close discussion of Saga issue #15, so it's spoilers-laden. Proceed with caution]

This week's issue has D. Oswald heist's Lighthouse home hosting a session of the "board game" "Nun Tuj Nun!" or "Now Means Now!" It's an "obscure Wreath boardgame" that I suspect Saga fans are already playing a reconstructed version of and putting videos of themselves playing it up on Youtube (and if they aren't, hop to it and we'll post them on Bleeding Cool). The game as shown features several totally disparate kinds of tasks that must be completed to compete in teams, from a makeshift Charades-like drawing/guessing round to ferocious arm wrestling, and finally a "psych out" round which plays out to particularly humorous (but also fairly serious) effect in this issue. Dice are used between rounds. Heist, who's our touchstone in the series for pithy statements about life in general (alongside Hazel, who does a fair job herself), says notably:

"There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book, and the board game. And Num Tuj Num—loosely, Now Means Now—is quite literally the greatest board game in the universe".

 

That is quite a pronouncement from Heist, and it operates on several levels. Firstly, it's funny because it starts off with symphony, which most people would agree is high art, then moves to children's books, which fans of illustrated books would heartily agree with but recognize that it's an embattled position for establishing greater legitimacy, and then winds up with the surprising punch-line of board games. Plenty of comics fans are also gaming fans, whether table-top, role-playing, or video games, so in many ways Brian K. Vaughan is preaching to the choir, but as a reader, I can honestly say that I've never heard anyone make the claim of high art before for board games. And so it stood out to me and made me sit back and think about why, in the context of Saga, Heist is saying this.

We already know that's he a purveyor of stories within stories, hidden messages to his readers, and has a totally irreverent view of the universe that nevertheless jumps off into high concepts with some frequency. So, for the sake of argument, I've decided to take Heist seriously. Ok, so board games are a form of high art. Why does that matter within the Saga universe? I've heard comic readers and critics talk before about how some stories and some comics are like games, and of course there's an increasingly close relationship between comics, films, and video games these days. But the first thing you'll notice if you ask yourself how Saga might be like a game is that the story units that shift you through the comic focus on "teams" and that many of the teams are trying to achieve the same goal before someone else does. They are doing this for different reasons, but for each the goal comes with some kind of perceived reward.

In fact, this issue is a perfect example of that framework. It opens with our reporters Upsher and Dosh, trying to get a quote from Countess Robot X about Private First Class Alana and her military service. Their scoop is their goal, and it sounds like they realize they are putting themselves in danger to pursue it given the maiming their fellow reporters gave suffered pursuing past stories. They "don't give a shit about the royal baby" because this story is their brass ring and they are in the running to break some news. Let's distinguish these "players" from the Countess, who isn't particularly concerned with involving herself in the story. Her game, in fact, is the long game of the war, and she's so invested that she can't see much else of importance. Upsher takes a sniper bullet, a surprise raising of the stakes. The question is, will they keep playing the game? Will they go further, or has it become too seriously risky for them? We'll see. But given they've appeared in previous issues, I think we can bet they are ongoing players. As Upsher says, while wounded, "Alan is already the biggest story of our…", lives presumably, or careers. They know the score.

Later in the comic, we have the "nice folks" who want to "murder" Hazel's parents locked in their own often sluggish pursuit of Alana, Hazel, and Marko. The Will, Gwendolyn, and Sophie have formed an unlikely "team" with some similar goals, and the fact that the Will and Gwen are working together at all is down purely to their drive to achieve their goal. Sophie's part in being able to locate Alana and Marko makes her a commodity for them in unusual ways, so she's along for the ride, though, to be fair, the Will does have a stake in rescuing her from her former life as a slave. If we're being inclusive, Lying Cat is also a player, but she's operating out of loyalty to the Will and his missions.

What's at play during this episode? Whether they can get their ship space-worthy and reach Quietus, where they suspect their fugitives are located. They know the goal, they just can't reach it yet. And like any roll of the dice in a game, there are possible disastrous set-backs. In this case, the dangers of their seemingly idyllic location turning people into hallucinating, homicidal maniacs. Are they going to keep playing? They've been with us since the beginning so, yes, assuming they survive their terrifying ordeal. We might note that the Will often suffers mild battles with his own will about whether this game is worth it. Once he's in motion, he's unlikely to stop, but still, he has his moments. He's not always happy about how things are playing out. As Gwen says to him, "Smile for fuck's sake". He knows things are strangely serious in this game.

But that leaves us with our characters who are literally playing a game in this issue. They are in some ways all on one team, though that's been in question in the past to some extent. Marko's parents were unhappy with the situation and had other plans in mind for their son's future. Thrown together on Quietus, locked in dialogue with the person who might be the gaming master of the series, Heist, things change. When we see Marko's mother Klara and Heist on the same team, that's an interesting dynamic. Is there some possible romantic tension there? And we have to ask ourselves, if Alana, Marko, and Hazel are the goal (and particularly Hazel) of most of the players in Saga, what's the goal of the prize-characters themselves? How can they still be gamers if they are the prize? Plenty of games involve pursuit and escape, but that can wear thin if survival is the only goal. And I think that's what we have here in Saga #15, and what, perhaps, Heist is really commenting on.

A game like Now Means Now! pushes people out of their comfort zones. Klara can't draw, and everyone is laughing at her, but she's doing it anyway, because she knows when it comes to the arm-wrestling round she's hot stuff. Think back to the Will and realize how unlikely and awkward it is for him to try to keep an eye on Sophie given his lack of experience with kids, but he's doing it because he knows that in rounds involving pursuit and fighting he's golden. Alana is getting very good at being a "domestic goddess" as well as keeping Hazel alive (what must be the biggest end game of all for her as a parent), but she's lacking a bigger goal than the survival role she's been cast in so far. Klara and Heist decide to win the "psych out" round of the game by convincing Alana that she has no plan, no real future for herself unless she changes her role in some way. They do it to win the game, but the conversations Alana has with Marko show that this is a serious issue and concern. There's a big "what next?" for Alana, Marko, and Hazel. Are they going to continue to be pieces on a board others are chasing, or can they "win" on a bigger level themselves? For that, they would have the start re-writing the game. And that's a big deal.

Heist, notably, seems like the only person in the series who's capable of thinking on such a big, all-encompassing level so far. He's created the game that's happening in Saga, in a way, by writing his novel A Nighttime Smoke. He's a little surprised that it worked, and that the game came to him in such a chaotic way, but he's happy to observe it and recognize the serious stakes involved. But he's not going to rewrite the game for Alana and Marko. He's already given them everything they need to do so by writing the book and giving them a breather to think about things. They have to figure out the potential for their game in their own way. We don't know what that is yet, but it's likely to involve the war between Wreath and Landfall to say the least. "Maybe we can help…make something", Marko says when he and Alana, fairly clueless, consider their future.

Make a better future? Perhaps. But certainly make a new game where they can be players with a goal rather than just trophies for other players. One last thought: Klara explains that the goal of Now Means Now! is to "survive the Harsh Truths, reach the summit of Mount Harnival and alight Kismet's lamp". That's a very different goal than our journalists, military men, and bounty hunters are looking for. That's almost certainly a goal for Alana and Marko, if they can figure out what that means, exactly. Those sound more like goals worthy of high art status for the comic, too, though if a game's well-played enough, who's to say that it isn't high art already?

Saga is written by Brian K. Vaughan, with art by Fiona Staples. It is published by Image.

Hannah Means-Shannon is Senior New York Correspondent at Bleeding Cool, writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org, and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress. Find her bio here.

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