Yes, Saga (Volume 1) Is Banned!

Alana and Marko are soldiers from opposite sides of a galaxy-spanning war. She has wings. He has horns. They fall in love, desert their armies, and have a baby named Hazel, who narrates the story from some point in the future. Every government, bounty hunter, and freelance killer in the galaxy wants them dead or captured. Brian K. Vaughan writes and Fiona Staples illustrates, and together they built one of the most acclaimed comics of the century.

Saga ranked #6 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books list in 2014 after an Oregon public library received a petition to remove Volume 1 for sexually explicit content. The book also made headlines in 2013 when Apple briefly pulled an issue from its digital store (Apple blamed a miscommunication with the distributor). Since 2022, Saga has been swept up in broader school library bans across Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Utah. Objections cite the comic’s frank depictions of sex, nudity, violence, and LGBTQ+ relationships.

Why You Should Read This

Saga is a love story disguised as a space opera. The stakes are galactic, but the heart of every issue is two exhausted parents trying to keep their kid alive while the universe tries to tear them apart. Vaughan writes dialogue that sounds like real people talking, even when those people have television sets for heads or spider bodies.

Fiona Staples’s art carries enormous emotional range, shifting from tender domestic moments to grotesque alien violence within a single page turn. The series treats sex, death, parenthood, and war as parts of the same story, because they are. Saga refuses to separate the beautiful from the ugly, and that refusal is what makes it feel so alive. If you’ve ever loved someone in a world that didn’t want you to, this book will hit you right in the chest.