All good things must come to a short pause or sabbatical before they make a grand comeback. In this case, it’s Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ epic sci-fi fantasy comic book series Saga.

Both co-creators announced that the comic book will take a 1-year break after releasing issue #54 this week worldwide. The team will resume with issue #55 in the far future. According to a Newsarama report, Brian did not give a concrete reason for the intermission but he did mention that this decision was for the best to make sure that the series is at its peak performance.

In other news, Brian’s other lauded series, Y: The Last Man, will have its own TV series adaptation.

After fifty-four issues and over 1,200 consecutive pages of sequential storytelling together, Fiona and I have decided to take an extended break before we eventually reunite with Saga #55. And unlike our usual three months of ‘Vacationanza’ between arcs, we plan to pause publication of this series for at least the next year.

This obviously wasn’t a decision we took lightly, but Fiona and I feel a responsibility to keep making the very best comic we can, and we both agreed that he only way to eventually finish the epic saga we set out to tell was with this one significant… let’s call it… Intermission!

We’re sad to see it take a year-long break, but it’s not like it’s going anywhere. Other great series like the One Piece manga did take a long break so that creator Eiichiro Oda can recoup and rejuvenate his sanity. This means that other comic book fans and story folks can catch up with the Saga series; it’s pretty darn good!

We won’t be seeing crazy panels like this for a long while…