Welcome back! It’s the summer and that means it is time for the Overthinking It Book Club. We are Overthinking the comic book series “Saga,” and this is Week 1, covering Chapters 1–3 of the series. Join Ben, Richard, Ryan, and Matt as we discuss the subversive nature of alligator butlers, why parenting is like an art project, subsidiarity, and the principal agent problem, and begin our love affair with Lying Cat.

→ Download the Saga Book Club Podcast

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Possible Episode Titles

We don’t pick titles for these episodes like we do on the

• Crazy Alligator People
• Pull Back from the Grease Monkey’s Garage
• “Good Help Being Hard to Find”
• Prince Jack Bauer Robot
• The Value of Opposed Forces
• The War Between Good and Good or, Between Bad and Bad
• “Can’t We Just Pursue Our Lives with Our Children and Our Wives”
• It’s Very Important to Have a Lying Cat

The Overthinking It Book Club

The book club has always been an experiment to see if we, the worldwide community of Overthinkers, can have as much fun looking at a work of literature as we have when we talk about movies, TV shows, and music.  We’ve done novels, we’ve done video games, and now we’re taking that idea into a yet another new medium by turning our eyes to the world of serialized comics.  Staring on July 6 and continuing for a 6-week series, we’ll be breaking down the acclaimed series “Saga” from Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples.

Get “Saga” (Issues 1–18)

Saga is an ongoing series, with new chapters coming out periodically. To focus our discussion, we’ll be reading just the first 18 chapters of the series.

You can read those 18 chapters in any number of different ways: in addition to the single releases, there are paperback Volumes with 6 chapters each, and even a hardcover with all 18 chapters in a single book.  There is probably a comic books store near you, and you should go out and support it by buying your edition there!

But if not, you can support Overthinking It by purchasing the books through an Amazon affiliate link:

• Paperback: Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 (with 6 issues per volume)
• Hardcover: Saga Deluxe Edition Volume 1 Hardcover (with all 18 chapters)
• Digital: iTunes Store

We’d be grateful if you can use those affiliate links, but if you are totally committed to a different platform, here are links for the Comixology store and DRM-free versions directly from Image.

The Syllabus

We’ve divided the game into six roughly equal chunks. You’ll get the most out of the club if you have played through these sections by these dates:

• Week 1 (this podcast): July 6 (Issues 1-3, first half of Vol. 1)
• Week 2: July 13 (Issues 4-6, second half of Vol. 1)
• Week 3: July 20 (Issues 7-9, first half of Vol. 2)
• Week 4: July 27 (Issues 10-12, second half of Vol. 2)
• Week 5: August 3 (Issues 13-15, first half of Vol. 3)
• Week 6: August 10 (Issues 16-18, second half of Vol. 3)

The Forums

For our discussion, we’re going to use a special section in the Overthinking It Forums. Friday before each section begins, we’ll open up a forum for the coming week with some study questions to get our discussion started. As you read over the weekend, you can answer our questions in the week’s forum, start your own discussion topics there, and chime in on discussions that others have started. Everything up to and including the week’s section of the book is fair game for discussion—but if you’ve read ahead, no spoilers for what is to come! (We’ll open up an “all-series” thread for those.)