"There's no graduating from this kind of education, couples just keep growing and changing until they either break up or die."

My god, what a beautiful and heartbreaking thing Saga is.

I think what made this volume especially heartwrenching--aside from the big death stuff that happens with certain characters--is the fact that at this point, the characters are established, the reader has emotions about them, and Brian K. Vaughan is free to spend more time destroying those emotions. It's not even that the situations are necessarily that much worse, because from the first page of the first volume, it's been nonstop obstacles for Alana, Marko, and their little family. But in Volume 5, you feel it so much more because you've been along for the ride longer, you're more invested, and things hit you way harder.

One of my favorite things about Saga is how impossible it is to describe it to someone without it sounding so, so stupid. In reality, of course, it's well-written and has interesting characters and is super stylishly drawn and is just all good things. But when I try to talk about it to someone who hasn't read it--in the hopes of brainwashing them into picking it up and sharing my obsession--I tend to get blank stares around the time I say "civil war between a planet where people have wings and its moon, where people have horns."

Which is all to say that the weirdness, the inexplicable stuff that gives Saga its characteristic Saga-ness, is well on display in this volume. I mean, there's a quest to gather dragon semen. But that quest to gather dragon semen, like all the other weirdness, is tied up in Serious Emotional Stuff. So it's not just a quest for dragon semen. It's a quest for dragon semen with a cause.

Really wish that I could convey that to the people I'm trying to convince to read this series.