An Introduction to “Paper Girls”

This week we’ll look at “Paper Girls,” written by Brian K. Vaughan with pencils/inks by Cliff Chiang, colors by Matt Wilson and letters and design by Jared K. Fletcher. It’s a 30 issue complete series from Image Comics that ran from 2015-2019. 1/8 #PaperGirls #ComicsStudies

The series follows a quartet of 12-year-old paper girls who become embroiled in a surreal and brutal war for control of our timeline, one that finds them hurtled to both the deep past and the furthest future (and everwhen in-between). 2/8

The series has been collected in multiple different formats (6 trades, 3 deluxe editions, and most recently a big ole compendium), and has now been adapted into a television series streaming on Amazon Prime. 3/8

For Vaughan, the series was a chance to return, with creative control, to the kind of epic time travel story he’d previously pursued with the television series Lost, as a writer, story editor & producer. This is something he speaks to in an interview with The Comics Journal: 4/8

“For the seasons I worked on Lost, time travel played a big part in the story, and I was obsessed with time travel as a kid, but I guess I wanted to take my crack at it and do something that was hopefully a little more subversive.” 5/8

Vaughan also speaks to parenting as a key theme: “I have young kids of my own & they’re so over-protected. I’m just thinking back to my own relatively latch-key childhood, how strange that was. It just felt like being 12 in the 80s had a dramatic interest we could exploit.” 6/8

“With Saga, I wanted to do a book of how it feels to be a parent. Paper Girls is what it feels like to be 12 & the way 12 can feel like an eternity & it’s over in an instant. You have these huge moments colliding w/ the mundane ones, but the mundane ones you remember more.” 7/8

We should also note that the series pre-dates Stranger Things by a little less than a year and shares a number of similar themes, approaches, and even a certain aesthetic sensibility at times. There’s some very strong parallels in play. 8/8