Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang

1 November 1988. Erin Tieng, a new resident of Stony Stream, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, is starting her new role delivering newspapers. Falling afoul of Halloween revellers, she joins forces with three other paper girls for mutual protection: Mac, KJ and Tiffany. The girls find their job complicated by the normal problems: creepy residents, overzealous cops, bullies and, obviously, a trans-temporal war between two different groups of time travellers from the far and even further futures. Sucked into a conflict spanning millions of years, the four girls have to work out how to survive, get home and prevent the annihilation of the universe. And get their papers delivered on time.

Paper Girls was an American comic book published between 2015 and 2019. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, better-known as the writer of the epic science fiction saga known as, er, Saga, the series has become a cult hit over the years. Amazon started adapting the show in 2022, creating a first season that was well-cast and excellently paced with some intriguing variances from the source material whilst also remaining faithful to the big picture. Obviously, being good, it could not be allowed to survive beyond a single season.

The original comic series was collected into a single volume a few years back, large enough to be used to stun a yak if wielded correctly. Read as a single piece, Paper Girls is relentless in its pacing. Every issue throws new ideas, new factions, new characters (or different versions of existing ones) and new creatures at the reader. Weird alien beings from another dimension? Sure. Dinosaurs? Obviously! Older versions of the main characters suffering from existential and mid-life crises? Go wild. This turns the book into a compelling page-turner, if an occasionally confusing one. Unlike the well-paced Saga, it's sometimes easy to lose the thread of what's going on in Paper Girls, what each faction is after, what resources they have access to and so forth.

In a way that increases the reader's empathy with the core quartet of girls, who sometimes get as lost in the morass of competing timelines, alternate selves and wars being fought for obscure reasons that haven't even happened yet. Our central quartet are grounded, interesting characters who grow and learn from their crazy experience. Sure, maybe they take the insane events a little too easily in their stride (the TV show works a bit better by slowing down the craziness, giving them more time to adjust to what's happening), but that also feels true to the 1980s SF movies the comic feels like it's homaging.

Ultimately the crazy SF antics are a backdrop to the simple notion of adolescent friendship. As Stephen King said, the friendships you form in later life are nothing like the ones you form at and before the age of 13 or so, and the whole book feels like it revolves around that idea. This gives the story universality, but can feel a bit like an overtrodden path, especially as contemporary projects like the superficially similar Stranger Things (which started after Paper Girls but obviously got a lot more attention) also went down the same route. But universal narratives which a lot of people can relate to remain powerful, especially if attached to the furniture of combat robots, weaponised lizards and religions emerging from modern corporate entities.

Paper Girls: The Complete Story (****) is a fun, breathless read, if sometimes a tad overwhelming or confusing. The well-drawn central characters pull the narrative back on course when it threatens to meander, and there's enough crazy SF antics to keep genre fans entertained. The book is available now. 

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Paper Girls: Season 1

 November 1st, 1988. Erin Tieng starts her first-ever early morning paper round, to the distress of her over-protective mother. She meets three other paper girls doing the same neighbourhood: Tiffany Quilkin, Mac Coyle and KJ Brandman. Their first challenges are late-night revellers and pranksters not over Halloween, followed by an escalation to getting involved in a temporal war spanning thousands of years. The girls have to navigate the timelines to find a way home, whilst also learning maybe far more than they should about their own personal futures.

Paper Girls started life as a comic by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang, which launched in 2015. The comic ran for 30 issues, ending in 2019 and wracking up significant critical acclaim along the way, including five Eisner Awards. Along with Stranger Things - which launched on Netflix ten months later - the comic was credited as being part of a wave of 1980s nostalgia-driven properties. Unlike Stranger Things, Paper Girls was credited for interrogating its nostalgia in a deeper way, and shining a light on the less pleasant aspects of the time period.

The television adaptation of Paper Girls is that rarest of beasts: a television adaptation that significantly improves on its source material. The same creative team as the brilliant Halt and Catch Fire are involved, so are no strangers to the 1980s nostalgia bandwagon with a darker and more cynical twist. But Paper Girls works primarily because the writers have the confidence to slow the comic's manic pace and focus more on character development. The comic is infamous for being relentless, throwing new ideas, time periods, factions and characters into the mix like a demented chef with a superfast new blender, which was both invigorating but also risked becoming seriously confusing at times. The TV show isn't slow-burning by any means, but it does know it doesn't have to be at full throttle all the time.

The show follows the comic in zeroing in on the central cast of four characters: Erin, Mac, KJ and Tiffany. It also achieves the near-impossible of finding the perfect cast to embody them: Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky, Fina Strazza and Camryn Jones respectively. These young actresses nail their characters from the opening moments and across the season rise to the challenge of having to drag them through the emotional wringer as they learn about their own futures, occasionally having arguments with their older selves about how their lives are nothing like what they had imagined.

They are ably supported by a top-notch supporting cast, led by Ali Wong and Sekai Abeni as the older versions of Erin and Tiffany, with the actresses doing great jobs of making them appear to be the same people separated by decades (shades of Yellowjackets, except the two incarnations of each character get to meet one another). There's also fantastic support by Adina Porter (True Blood, The 100), Nate Corddry (For All Mankind) and Jason Mantzoukas (Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine Nine).

The show succeeds by mixing its time-travelling, crazy SF antics with more human stories. Erin dreams of graduating from college and becoming the first Asian-American President of the United States; she occasionally breaks from the action to filter events through an imagined Presidential TV debate with Ronald Reagan (the CG Reagan is the show's weakest link, effects-wise). KJ is worried that her future will be determined by her controlling parents. Tiffany dreams of going to a top university and using her intelligence for good purposes. Destitute Mac doesn't even know what her future could be. As each of them discovers their destinies, they have to confront the people they're going to be (literally) and what choices they can make in the past to change things for the better. This theme is a minor element in the comics but becomes a much bigger focus in the TV show.

But the time-travelling, crazy SF elements are still here and they show up in a big way. City-sized spaceships, raging mech fights, gun battles between time-travelling armies and dinosaurs (!) are all present and correct, just slowed down a bit and given more weight than in the comics.

The series starts well, ticks along nicely and ends on a hell of a cliffhanger. The cast is exemplary, the writing is strong and the effects are superb, not being allowed to overwhelm the show as they have for other properties. Above all, the show knows how to use its time-travelling premise to tell really human stories. The only weak link is that the throttled-down pace is maybe a tad too throttled-down, and the main storyline feels like it goes on a break a few times until they get back on track.

Paper Girls (****½) is the rare example of a TV adaptation that improves on its source material to become a compelling watch. It is available now on Amazon Prime Video worldwide.

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Amazon releases first trailer for PAPER GIRLS and confirms airdate

Amazon have released the first (short) trailer for their upcoming adaptation of the Paper Girls comic series.

The comic, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Cliff Chiang, ran from 2015 to 2019 and told the story of four teenage girls in 1988 who are inadvertently involved in a conflict between two groups of time-travellers. The resulting chaos sees them displaced to multiple time periods, meeting later versions of themselves and trying to stay alive whilst also ending the temporal war and restoring the increasingly fractured timeline. Along the way they also have to navigate more traditional coming-of-age problems.

The TV version of the story stars Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle, Camryn Jones as Tiffany Quilkin, Fina Strazza as KJ Brandman and Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng, with Ali Wong playing her older self.

Paper Girls lands on Amazon Prime Video on 29 July.