Graphic novel review: Paper Girls volumes 1 & 2 by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Cliff Chiang (artist)

Time travel is always a compelling element to add to the narrative mix.

There’s the inherent upsetting of the linear natural order, the frisson of excitement that comes from wildly unpredictable parts trying to fit into a whole to which they don’t organically belong and the confusion/thrill of characters grappling with something far outside the norm.

That’s a lot of extra ingredients into the storytelling pie and done well it can turbocharge a story as well as adding some interesting elements of humanity well and truly out of its comfort zone and unsure where it’s all going to lead but knowing that it had to keep up, anyway.

Paper Girls, now streaming on Prime Video, which is written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang (with colours by Matt Wilson and letters by Jared K. Fletcher) knows expertly how to wrangle chronological shenanigans into its narrative, serving up a story of four 12-year-old girls, all of whom operate paper routes in a subdivision of Cleveland, Ohio in 1988, trying to make sense of events that quickly spiral well and truly out of their understanding and control.

Set at Halloween where, rather happily for a narrative full of strange machines, skulking figures, and white armour clad warriors on pterodactyls, strange goings-on are not that weirdly out of place, Paper Girls excels because at its heart it’s about four nascent teenagers having to come to grips with the fact that their lives will change and in ways too impossible for them to conceive of and deal with, especially when instead of organically coming to fruition, they seemingly blink into existence out of nowhere.

With a decided Stranger Things (the series come out not that long after the first issues so the two share the same inspirational slice of the zeitgeist) / Speilbergian coming-of-age vibe, Paper Girls is one of those series that focuses on the inherent humanity of its central characters.

While all the action is full-on and fun/scary/amazing/terrifying, depending on who you are and what’s happening to you at the time, Paper Girls manages to insert some fairly intense existential drama into the mix too, evoking an emotional intimacy that comes largely from various characters having to confront their earlier/later/different selves as they are flung about centuries and well into the future and past like time-strewn piñatas.

Central to the story is Erin Tieng, who’s devoted to her younger sister Misty and who has some unexplained but hinted-at trauma that has seen her retreat into a world defined by her family and home.

Content to have her sister as her only real close friend, she is rescued from an intimidatory attack by Halloween-clad bullies one night while delivering papers by Mackenzie”Mac” Coyle, the first female paper route holder in their neighbourhood, and her besties Karina “KJ” J. Brandman and Tiffany “Tiff” Quilkin who quickly bond into an unexpected foursome when really strange things start happening.

People are disappearing everywhere, vortex are opening in the sky and unsettling unseeable figures are fighting each other in a town that now resembles an unsettling eerie ghost town.

As Halloweens go, it’s even weirder and stranger than normal and it soon becomes clear that the girls have far more on their plate than just some annoying idiot boys in costume.

At its heart, is the mystery of why all of this is happening, and even as you reach the end of volume 2, it’s still enticingly unclear why it is that the two groups the girls encounter – for spoiler prevention purposes, these people shall remain unnamed and undefined – are at work with each other.

Certainly, it’s clear there are extreme philosophical distances between them, so extreme in fact that they are actively at war with each other across time and you imagine space.

All Erin, Mac and the others knows is that they are caught in the middle of it, that they’re being forced to confront their past, present and future selves without invitation or preparation, and that growing up is happening a whole lot faster than any of them predicted.

With Cliff Chiang’s vividly-realised artwork amplifying the impact of Brian K. Vaughan’s emotionally resonant writing to a thrilling degree, time and place set by illustrations that world-build in dramatically intense and excitingly frightening fashion, Paper Girls is that perfect marriage of word and image, the two working together to create a rich, involving storyline that never lets you stop for a moment.

The impressive thing is that for all its pell-mell action that seldom lets up, Paper Girls still feel emotionally raw and intimate, a deep dive into what it means to be someone, or someones, dealing with the end of childhood in frantically accelerated fashion.

As Erin, Mac, KJ and Tiff trying to work out what to do next and whom to trust in a time-challenged world where next steps are not clear and seldom at their choosing, Paper Girls goes from strength to strength throughout these two volumes, telling an exciting story of time and lives turned on its head and how four amazing girls deal with having everything they have ever known turned upside down.

Now adapted for streaming, Paper Girls is set to reach an even wider audience …

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