Amadan na Briona

The first chapter was okay, but didn't hook me, but this volume grew on me, because Saga is one of those series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer that is based on an inherently silly premise, but develops into an interesting, tragi-comic saga full of characters who start out simply bizarre and imaginative but become more interesting every time they reappear.

Saga is a love story about Marko, a horned demonic humanoid from Cleave, and Alana, a winged fairy-ish humanoid from Landfall. Cleave is a moon of Landfall, and is inhabited by magical beings, while Landfall is highly technological. The armies of Cleave and Landfall have been at war for generations, and their war has spread across the galaxy.

Alana and Marko are two warriors from the opposing armies. They fall in love and have a baby, and right away are being pursued by their respective armies as well as Freelancers, all of whom have an interest in seeing them dead and their miscagenated child captured.

This is a comic book science-fantasy, but it's an adult one so there's of course a lot of alien sex, body parts and organs being sprayed bloodily about the panels, and wry one-liners about missing vaginas and scat fetishes.

Marko and Alana are both bad-ass ex-soldiers who want to stop fighting and repeatedly state their dedication to laying down their arms, but end up mowing down one goon squad after another.

In the course of their adventure, they meet a spider woman Freelancer, the spider woman's ex who's also a Freelancer, with a Lying Cat, who wants to free a six-year-old sex slave from a space brothel, a spunky teenage ghost with her intestines hanging out of her disembodied torso, a TV set-headed aristocrat of the Robot Empire, and a bunch of expendable mooks. In volume one, they escape the planet on which their child was born by flying on a wooden rocketship growing in the Rocketship Forest. They go in search of the super-genius author of the interspecies Harlequinn romance novels which apparently got Alana interested in hot horned-demon action in the first place.

So yes, it's all quite bizarre, but it starts to make more sense and become interesting when you read it.