By Zack Quaintance — When is Saga coming back is a question that continues to hang heavy within comics, and in recent weeks we got a clearer answer — Saga is not coming back this year, as sad as it is to say that. In March after industry-wide distribution shut down during the pandemic, I posited that Saga would be back by the end of the year, riding in to save flagging sales for the small network of comic book retailers across the country.

We now know that that guess — sorry to say — is wrong. In late September, Image Comics released its December 2020 solicitations. For those of you who don’t follow the industry obsessively (and maybe only read Saga and stumbled to this page via curious Google search), solicitations are comics retailer/reader parlance for previews of what’s to come. They go out roughly three months before titles hit shops, so that local comic book stores can make their pre-orders well in advance of release. The bad news is that within Image Comics December 2020 solicitations, nary a mention of Marko, Alana, nor Brian K. Vaughan was to be found.

So, what does that mean for the big question of when is Saga coming back, actually? The simple answer is that we still don’t know. As I noted the last time I tried to guess, Brian K. Vaughan has for over a year now been saying publicly that the only thing he’s working on within comics is Saga, Saga, and, hey, how about a little more Saga? He’s also said that the idea is to have an entire arc (six issues) in the can before he and his artistic collaborator Fiona Staples schedule the release of the first issue, thereby insuring there will be no delays (and, one also assumes, no burnout by trying to meet oppressive deadlines).

Anyway, so there we have it — no new issues of Saga to come in 2020, even as that heartrending cliffhanger from Saga #54 continues to linger in the air. Maybe the team and the publisher will lead a big 2021 with a Saga announcement within the January solicitations (due out within the next two weeks), or maybe they’ll wait until the pandemic and the world have stabilized a bit more, minimizing the impact of economic disruptions on the big return. It all remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I highly recommend you to checkout our Saga Re-Read Project, within which I revisited and re-contemplated each issue of the book, thinking by the time I was done, new issues would be back (I was so naive back then!).

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.