ShayKay's Review of Saga Vol. 1-9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

I've recently just finished Saga Vol. 4-9 and I wanted to do a review of them but since I didn't do 1-3 review we are just going to wrap them all up into one review! So what is Saga?

Saga is a comic that is written by Brian K. Vaughn and then illustrated by Fiona Staples. The main focal point of the whole series is Hazel. Hazel is actually the main narrator throughout the whole series and they are set up in her point of view. She's retelling the story of her family and how she came to be. Hazel is a product of her parents' love for each other regardless of their species. One key thing to mention is that this is set in space and Hazel's parents are from two different worlds, her mom is from a planet and her father is from the planet's moon. They two species have been at war with one another for centuries and Hazel's parents were actually in their respective armies. Her mom, Alana, was a soldier that was guarding her father, Marko, after he was captured. Long story short they fall in love and ended up pregnant with Hazel. Throughout the course of these 9 volumes, we see how this couple struggles with regular family problems plus the additional problems of being wanted fugitives. They go through everything and we don't just get their perspectives we also see the perspectives of the people who are trying to capture them as well as each of their governments and war. As time goes by the family grows and also loses people. The comics span over years so we really get to watch Hazel grow up. This is the bare synopsis of the whole series, and there's so much that happens in these books that I'm intentionally leaving out because I don't want to spoil how amazing these comics are!

Now I will say these are definitely not comics that you want to give to kids because there's a lot of explicit scenes and language so it is definitely an adult comic. 

There's never really a dull moment in any of these books because you have them trying to survive with a newborn baby while being on the run from both of their governments, you see people chasing them and their whole dramas, we see bits and pieces of the war, and so on. Things keep getting added on in each comic too, so you never have any moments that are just hard to get through. My lowest rating for one of these volumes was a 4-star, most of them are all 5-stars in my eyes. Even the average ratings for each comic are 4-stars and they each have thousands of reviews. I want a more in this world and I honestly don't know if we will get any more. The last one left off on a huge cliff hanger and it was released years ago. I've found an article saying that the authors wanted to take a hiatus after that cliff hanger but this has been years ago so I'm truly curious about whether or not if there will be more because there is potential to be a lot more. But at the same time the way the last one ended it could be the finale, I just think there could have been more if this was the finale such as a time jump to see how Hazel grew up. 

I was lucky to finish this series today because I was able to buy the six volumes I was missing the other day, and as soon as we got back from our little adventure I binge-read them all. I plan on keeping these on my shelves and if there is ever anymore that comes out I'll binge read them all over again. They are just fun to read and packed with so much. I really want to know more about the characters! Since this is June I was also able to count these towards my HouseCupAThon, and even put them on the Flying Car challenge. As always Instagram gets first to look at everything because it's easier for me to keep it updated in real-time and over here I don't want to publish everything right as I read it because I want to spread my content over time and have more. Which is why this post has come out basically a week after I've read them. Anyways I'm working on getting through One to Watch, which that is going to be an interesting post hopefully coming out soon, I try to keep something published every Sunday and Wednesday over here. Wednesday is sometimes skippable but we'll see. Book reviews tend to be on Sundays and random or book reviews on Wednesday. Sometimes fun things here and there when I can fit it in.

HouseCupAThon June 2020

I have been wanting to do some sort of readathon/bookathon for awhile now. The only one I have ever done before is the Buzzword Readathon that BooksandLaLa does but I haven't really done any of the backup stuff for it before, such as a blog post or even Instagrammed it a lot so this time I thought we would put the real effort into it and see how it goes. I don't really count the Book of the Month Spring Reading Challenge that I just finished because again I didn't really document it on here, there wasn't much participation in it other than on Facebook but I loved it and for the last few book reviews or pictures on my Instagram showcased the charts I made for the books. Since I loved it so much it really inspired me to look for a new reading challenge. During this search, I found a blog that has a list of readathons! It was so freaking helpful because when you type readathons in on Google you get really overwhelmed with the results and, to be honest, I started following a lot of twitter accounts throughout this search without really looking into the readathons themselves. I'm not a big twitter person so when the readathons are based on Twitter I really fall behind. Anyways this amazing blog that has a freaking calendar for the readathons is called Little Book Owl, the link will take you straight to the calendar. From here it was so easy to look through all of the readathons that are going on this month and it is really organized. I really love this. I believe she is actually a YouTuber that I follow. 

There were a lot of different readathons that I really wanted to jump into this month but since this is the first one that I'm really going to put a lot of effort into I'm going to do just one for now and I've chosen to do the HouseCupAThon's June Readathon! I chose this one because one they do have an Instagram for their readathon, but they are based mostly on discord, which I have both of those and prefer using them both so that ticks off a really important box for me. They do have a twitter account too, and the Instagram is new so it is just getting off its feet while the twitter account has a lot of content on it already. I'm going to try to be more active on Twitter, but where it's my personal account and I don't even use that I just don't use it. I've thought about deleting everything on it and making one for my book or sims but I haven't made that leap yet and I don't think I will. The second thing that I saw that really gave this potential for me personally right off the bat is that it is a Harry Potter readathon! You all know I'm a Harry Potter nerd and completely obsessed with it! You aren't required to read the whole Harry Potter series within the month but they do want you to read one of them, and the buddy read is the second Harry Potter book for the month, which I do need to finish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for my other projects anyways and can easily jump into the buddy read. But what really sold me on this was the fact that I had the opportunity to take their reading prompts and throw them into a chart. We learned recently that I'm in love with taking charts like this making them funky and fun and slapping book covers on them! So that's what I did with their prompts. Now it was a little confusing getting into the discord but I'm still a discord newbie and this is all new to me but if I can navigate it and figure out the basics than it isn't too bad. The challenge is a point-based and you work with your house to fight for the house cup. I'm in love with the concept and cannot wait to jump in. 

Since it is a house challenge I took the prompts and then made all four houses their own chart to give it a little personality for each house. Here are all of the ones that I made for the HouseCupAThon, now I am Gryffindor house, but I might look into one that has all of the house colors because I really love colorful things and Hogwarts one should be more colorful, but as for now I'm going to be using the Gryffindor one. As usual, I got the background off of Pinterest and then made the graph on a Word document, and then added some emojis and the rest of the stuff in Pic Collage. All of the prompts are the same on each picture, the only thing different is the houses aesthetics. 

For me, the point system on Instagram makes the most sense when I was trying to figure out how it goes. They are probably posted on discord and twitter too but like I've previously mentioned I just don't know or use them much yet. I'll probably still need someone to help me put points in when I'm done reading a book but that's future Shay problems. Here are the points:

• 5 Points - if you have to DNF (do not finish) a book. But in order to get the 5 points, you have to have at least 25% completed
• 10 Points - if the book you've read is less than 100 pages
• 30 Points - if the book you've read is between 101-200 pages
• 50 Points - if the book you've read is between 201-400 pages
• 50 Points - for completing a reading challenge (a tile on the pictures above)
• 70 Points - if the book you've read is between 401-500 pages
• 100 Points - if the book you've read is over 501 pages
• 100 Points - for completing the required reading (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

You can double up on reading challenges however each challenge can only be used once. So out if you complete all of the challenges you can win your house 750 points!

All of the points get added up in the discord chat and goes towards your house the one with the most points wins the house cup! I love this concept and I love this readathon so I cannot wait to jump in on it. Since the challenges are named Lockhart, Dobby, and Tom Riddle's Journal I made sure to add the requirements for each tile this time around. The requirements stayed in Time Roman while I got to have fun with the challenge name's fonts. 

Normally I like to save posting my challenges I do until the end of the year or the end of the challenge to post but this time around I think I'm going to post this now so you all can see why every book I have in the month of June will be credited towards this readathon and you'll always have one of the collages above listed out. I think on my Instagram I might only use Gryffindor since that is what house I'm in on Discord but over here I think we will show all of the houses love. I don't know I might do that on Instagram too since right now I'm getting really tired of seeing all of the same pictures on my feed because I kept reposting my BOTM challenge every time I completed a book. I also really like how I formatted my last book with a book aesthetic, book rating, and then the challenge. I think this works out perfect for me. If you don't like it let me know and we can work on other ideas for me to do.

Since we are posting this now with updates as we go I'm going to put the date at the bottom of each update so you can see what I did and when.

(June 1, 2020)

So I finished my first book for June 2020 and here is my updated reading chart! Since I made a post about Beach Read by Emily Henry I'm just going to a short little rating for it. I loved this book and it was such a great way to kick off HouseCupAThon! I love using books I already own during readathons to help clean up my shelves and this month is perfect for that because I'm getting ready to redo my shelves and do an unhaul soon. Anyways the book was something that I've had for a couple months and I don't know why I was sitting on it. I need to go through and really read all of my backstock of Book of the Month books! I don't have an official TBR for this either because I'm a mood reader and I love having the freedom to bounce around to whatever book I feel like reading and usually gave multiple books going at one time. But with Beach Read, it sucked all my attention in and I couldn't put it down. To be honest, if I wasn't remodeling my house I would've been done with this a lot faster! I hope my next book goes the same way! 

(June 3, 2020)