[This is part two of a three part series exploring Saga. Please note that this series deals with adult topics. To read the first part of this series, please follow this link. (Larry)]
A common theme surrounding comic books is the male gaze and the negativity surrounding it. Fiona Staples, Saga‘s artist, takes the male gaze to a whole new level and blasts it in a significant and critical way.
Saga
When The Will heads to the planet Sextillion to blow off some steam before heading out to find and assassinate Alana and Marko, the reader is greeted by a picture that might stun some to silence: Two women stand facing the reader, but the women don’t have torsos. Their legs meet, instead, where their throats would be, suggesting that the face of a woman is located right at her vagina. Both of the women are wearing impossibly high stiletto heels and fishnet stockings, and both of them have disproportionately large mouths. Oh also, they aren’t wearing any clothing other than their stockings and heels.
So why would I suggest that this is a critique of the male gaze? Staples illustrates Sextillion as a lewd, impossibly sexualized planet that places the value of living beings in their sexual organs. The women in the picture don’t have breasts, because you can’t have sex with a woman’s breast (okay, you can, but this isn’t sexual show-and-tell). What they have are large mouths and, we can assume, easily accessible vaginas.
The entire planet of Sextillion is orgiastic, but Staples purposely shows The Will walking through a hall where there is only woman-on-woman sexual activity taking place. Women are making out with each other, performing oral sex on one another, or using dildos on one another. Why have an entire page of this? Because Staples, I think, is being deliberate. Not only is she showing exactly what happens on Sextillion, but she’s drawing very specific attention to the fact that there aren’t any males when The Will first arrives. All we see are overly-sexualized females. In fact, the only instance of male sexualization is when a group of men are stacked as a triangle, being whipped by what can be assumed to be a dominatrix.
I argue that this isn’t meant to offend, and is instead meant to bring sharp attention to the fact that this hasn’t been seen anywhere else in Saga. We see Prince Robot IV having sex with Princess, and we see Alana and Marko making out a few times, but in each of those instances, the women have agency. The women we see on Sextillion have no agency, and they are literally used for their physical attributes. We don’t really have a backstory on the women of Sextillion, so there’s no telling if they’re willing sex workers or forced sex slaves, which is an important difference. However, judging by The Will’s later interaction with a child sex slave, it can be assumed that none of these women actually want to be there.
On a personal note, I absolutely loved The Will’s reaction to being shown a child prostitute known only as Slave Girl: He crushes the skull of the person who took him to see her, and eventually is able to get her off Sextillion. I am completely okay with that.
