As I say in the Chapter Three of Bookbanter, at it's heart, Saga is a love story, and a story about family. This comes across in the relationships with the main characters, their love for their child, and the child's love for her parents, as well as their love for other family members.
I mentioned that Compendium One collects the first half of the series, which is also collected in nine trade editions. The compendium actually retails at $60, though some places have it on sale for as low as $40.
As you can see from the photo below, it is a thick and hefty tome.
It makes a good door stopper or paperweight, but the fact that it's paperback makes it much more portable and easy to read compared to say the big hardcover Absolute Sandman editions. Obviously those are the pinnacle of beautiful graphic novel editions, but they are certainly heavy and cumbersome and the idea of bringing them to the beach for reading is . . . well, anathema.
Compendium One is the best of both worlds in being paperback and relatively easy to carry and transport around in a backpack say, and is over 1300 pages of glorious graphic novel beauty.
It's pretty special that we get so many wonderful choices in how to read graphic novels, much like regular books which can be read in hardcover, trade paperback, or mass market. Each edition has a different price point, making it more accessible to those with specific financial abilities.
And the trades (and possibly Compendium One) are available in many libraries and/or can be requested and transferred, so chances are you can get to reading this great series in some way.