What I’m reading: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga—the print version

Maybe I’m just a crotchety old fart, but when it comes to comics, I prefer paper to digital.

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A few summers ago, I had a conversation with my brother Josh about his work in comics.

I had just gotten into webcomics at the time—as with everything, very late to the game—because I’d become interested in Howard Tayler, one of the hosts of Writing Excuses (a podcast about the craft of writing—highly recommended). As author of a web comic series, Schlock Mercenary, Tayler brought a different perspective to the Writing Excuses table, offering insights about how telling stories graphically (and posting them daily) makes his writing process different from his co-hosts’. The most obvious difference was his inability to revise his stories the way his co-hosts could (“LUK-xury!”).

He also talked a bit about the different ways he turned his writing and art into a living.

So: armed with ideas from Tayler’s experience, and excited by a handful of web comics that I’d recently discovered (most notably Girl Genius), I asked Josh if he had considered serializing his work on the web. At that time—at least, as I remember it—he was fairly passionate in his rejection of the idea. A computer, or even a tablet, isn’t the same as a book in the hand. Colors on a screen aren’t the same as colors on paper. Screen orientations tend to be landscape, not portrait. Etc.

All that is correct, of course, but—technophile and webcomic expert that I was—I bristled a little at what felt a bit like old-school snobbery.

He’s come around since then. His current project-in-progress, Quarterly Stories—a personal story about faith and mental illness that he hand writes, hand letters, hand inks, and hopes someday to hand to you in print—is serialized online, both on the Quarterly Stories site and on Tapas Comics. He’s also used his YouTube channel to offer peeks behind the curtain, most recently in his “48-Hour Art Check,” where he and fellow artist Cory Kerr hold each other accountable for consistent work.

But I’ve come around since then, too. I’ve decided he was right. For me, at least, comics are just better in print.

I’m not saying I never read comics online. I’ve really enjoyed Bitch Planet, for example, which I bought off ComiXology. And in some cases, no print version exists—such as the work of a former student of mine (Frankie!), who has started her own web comic—because, perhaps, the art is meant to take advantage of back-lit screens.

I even made sure to buy a laptop that can fold back into a tablet, specifically so I could read web comics in portrait mode, reducing the need to zoom and scroll all over the place.

But it’s still not the same.

Now, I have no problem foregoing hard copy novels for the Kindle. I can go either way, in that case (unless I’m traveling—the Kindle is amazing for traveling, since I can take a whole library with me).

But in the case of comics… there’s just something about the experience of print. It’s easier to read. I can turn back pages to recall a name without having to wait for page after page to reload. I can “zoom in” by holding it closer to my face. And it’s much easier on the eyes—oh, these aging eyes!—than are pages on a screen.

I received Saga, Vol. 1—in print, thankfully—as a gift, probably off my Amazon wish list. I’d first heard of Saga back in 2015, when a student journalist for The Prospector (I was adviser), Belinda Armstrong, included Volume 3 of the series at the top of her “Top Comics of 2014.” And my interest was deepened when I found the series on a list of must-read feminist comics (it might have been this “Field Guide,” though many such lists understandably have a lot of overlap) for its depiction of a bad-ass mother.

So far—I’ve just finished the first chapter—it’s amazing: childbirth, violence, sex, and exposition, all with wonderfully colorful, evocative art. And having that complex narrative and its art on glossy paper, in hand and flip-backable (that’s a term of art)… well, this is the way I want to read graphic novels.