Saga relies on a stable of heroes, antiheroes, and villains who span the spectra of age, class, gender, race, and sexual orientation. The constant violence these characters face forces them to make painful choices, and though they sometimes make grave mistakes, Staples and Vaughan don’t demonize them. As a result, Saga is filled with well-rooted plotlines that engage organically with the characters’ arcs and with tricky topics such as pacifism and abortion. The series’s ethos and stunning quality has led to widespread acclaim: Saga has collected a staggering 12 Eisner Awards (essentially the Oscars for comic books). And as the political sphere grows ever more toxic with ascendant nativism and other displays of prejudice, Saga stands out as a profane, glorious ode to compassion and equality.

Since Saga is a comic series, it’s worth starting with the art: Staples’s illustrations hold a particular power even viewed apart from the narrative. In science fiction, as in most genres, white masculinity is the cultural default. Some people bound to those norms have viewed deviations—for instance, a black Stormtrooper in Star Wars or an Asian woman captaining a starship in Star Trek: Discovery—as millennial pandering at best, or “white genocide” at worst. Yet as Vaughan has recounted in interviews, Staples’s first question when he pitched the main couple to her was, “Well, do they have to be white?” The artist went on to model Alana as a mixed-race, dark-skinned woman and Marko as an East Asian man, though both are aliens. (Alana has small wings, and Marko sports a daunting set of ram’s horns.) While horns-versus-wings intolerance between their home planets is a proxy for racism, their skin color is never discussed in the series. And because the duo are the main characters, they become the implied default of their universe.

Staples’s drawings also subvert exhausted racist tropes. Popular films and TV shows often strip Asian men of sexuality and masculinity, a tendency that Asian American celebrities like Fresh Off the Boat writer Eddie Huang and TV star Jake Choi have criticized. Staples has noted that some readers can’t even tell that she depicted Marko as East Asian because she didn’t rely on caricature to distinguish him as such. Meanwhile, pop culture regularly exoticizes women of color, rendering them as one-dimensional figures. By contrast, Staples manipulates Alana’s expressions to capture her multifaceted personality: the sly humor to her smirk, the willpower under fire, the softer love for her husband and daughter.

Image Comics / Fiona Staples

As The Atlantic’s David Sims wrote in 2014, Saga is basically unfilmable because of its narrative’s epic scale, its outrageous denizens, its violence and sex, and related technological and financial challenges. But Saga also makes visible individuals whom Hollywood has historically ignored or erased on the flawed grounds that stories about queer characters or people of color aren’t broadly marketable. Vaughan confessed that he worried Saga would be canceled by its third issue partly for this reason.