Summer is here, and that means the Overthinking It Book Club is back! The book club is a podcast where we subject a single book to extended scrutiny over a mini-series of six episodes.

Our first two book clubs were the novels Ender’s Game and Slaughterhouse Five. Not satisfied with being tied down by a little thing like “the definition of the word ‘book’”, we branched out into a new medium with our discussion of the video game Final Fantasy VI.

Now, we’re back and exploring a medium that is not just new for me personally, but new for Overthinking It—the acclaimed graphic novel Saga.

We’ve been wanting to tackle a comic for a while now, and we’re very excited to dive into this series from Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. This space opera is chock-full of crazy creatures, magical beings, sex, cursing, and a lot of other interesting stuff, so we’ll have a lot of fun diving into it.

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 Podcast

The Book Club unfolds in weekly segments on the Book Club Podcast, released mid-week, with Ben and other Overthinking It writers. We’ll talk over the week’s reading, address some of the study questions, and highlight our favorite discussions from the forums.

Subscribe to get new episodes automatically:

Book Club Podcast on iTunes
Book Club Podcast RSS Feed

The Syllabus

As we have with our previous texts, the Book Club will break the books into chunks to discuss in detail, close-reading the plot, art, characters, and themes, while placing the text into a wider context of philosophical and artistic thought. To give everyone time to order the book and start reading, we won’t start releasing episodes and discussing the work for a week.

• Week 1: 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

The most important part of the Book Club is getting the entire OTI community involved. For our discussion, we’re going to use a special section inthe Overthinking It Forums. We’ll open up a thread for each Week of the Book Club, and everything up to and including the week’s reading is fair game for discussion—but if you’ve read the book, no spoilers for what is to come! (We’ll have a whole-book thread for those who have read it before.)