I’m sort of reviewing the second volume of Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. But I’m also reviewing how I read the second volume.

Let’s kick of with the actual review. Where we last left our heroes (I think they’re heroes, anyway), they’re escaping the planet on a tree-based rocket ship. Did I mention our heroes have horns (the man) and wings (the woman), and they have a child with both? And their child’s babysitter is a ghost? And they’re being chased by a bounty hunter/hitman (called a Freelancer) who has a cat that can tell when you’re lying?

Yeah, it’s weird. And it’s great.

I’d tell you the story was an allegory, but that insinuates that the meaning is hidden. They don’t hide much in this story. They punch you in the face with it, and you’ll like it that way.

The story continues it’s subversive take on… well, everything. I really don’t know that it holds anything dearly. It tells a sincere story in a funny, sad, angry way. And I can’t wait to keep reading it.

But I didn’t want to fill up my bookshelves with these comics I could read too quickly. I decided to go digital. First I checked to see if Kindle could hold comics (seemed logical). It could, but Amazon sends you ComiXology, which was an independent company that Amazon acquired in the last couple of years.

ComiXology is basically Kindle dedicated to comics. So while you can read the comics on Kindle, ComiXology tries to offer a better experience. I don’t know how much better it really is. As far as I could tell, the only difference was that you can go pane-to-pane instead of reading the whole page (the Kindle does a similar thing in a more clunky way). Overall, the experience was fine, though sometimes it zooms in and out of content on panes when it doesn’t need to. It’s trying to help you read or notice something, but then it distorts how the creators designed the pane, so sometimes it actually inhibits. That said, the pane-to-pane feed allows me to focus more on the individual pane, which is good for someone who has a bid habit of skimming faster than I can read. But you also lose the big-picture page view. Sometimes pages are designed so panes aren’t actually independent of each other, so that takes getting used to.

That said, it was fine overall. A B+ experience reading an A+ comic. For the sake of my bookshelves, I’ll probably keep reading this way (except when I pick up new graphic novels in actual bookstores). I’m going to give it another try with the second volume of The Last Man, so I’ll have a better idea if this will stick long-term.

But until then, stay tuned for a review of the next volume of The Sandman (Volume 4, I believe).