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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Amazon releases first teaser for PAPER GIRLS

Amazon TV has released the first teaser for its upcoming series Paper Girls, based on the comic series by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang.

Paper Girls ran from 2015 to 2019 and attracted critical acclaim, solidifying Brian Vaughan's position as one of the world's premier comic book writers (along with his work on Y: The Last Man, Runaways and Saga). Beginning on Halloween, 1988, the story follows four teenage girls in Stony Stream, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) who deliver papers in their spare time for extra money. The girls are inadvertently caught up in a temporal war involving two factions from different periods in the future, and find themselves travelling between different periods of the past and future in an effort to stop the conflict.

The series stars Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle, Camryn Jones as Tiffany Quilkin, Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng and Fina Strazza as KJ Brandman. Other castmembers include Ali Wong and Nate Corddry. The series was filmed between May and October 2021.

Paper Girls should debut on Amazon Prime Video later this year.

Wertzone Classics: Saga - Compendium One by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Alana and Marko were born on different sides of the devastating war between Landfall and its satellite, Wreath. The war rages across the galaxy, consuming world after world, with no official contact between the two sides. But Alana and Marko have, somehow, become lovers and had a child, Hazel, showing that more than just coexistence is possible. This has made them the most dangerous, wanted fugitives in the galaxy and dozens of skilled hunters and assassins are on their tail.

Saga is the story of a girl named Hazel, who is born and grows up under decidedly unusual circumstances. This small-scale story is a window into a much larger and more epic...well, saga. It takes in androids (here depicted as humanoids with televisions for heads), assassins, lie-detecting cats, sex, magic, guns, wooden spaceships, drugs, superheroes and cyclopses. There's so much going on in Saga that it's impossible to convey its sheer scope succinctly.

The comic book's writer is Brian K. Vaughan, late of Y: The Last Man, Paper Girls and his work in television (on Lost and Under the Dome) and its artist is Fiona Staples (also responsible for a recent Archie relaunch). Both had reasonable careers before Saga, but it does feel like this is the project that both had been waiting for, something to take both their careers to the next level. Vaughan's writing is relaxed and confident (some of the misjudgements in tone that plagued early Y are here absent) and Staples' artwork is brimming with character and colour. The combination of the two is potent, resulting in a gripping and page-turning experience.

Saga is a family saga first and foremost, as we see Hazel being raised by her parents: Marko, a pacifist who keeps being forced back into violence and Alana, a rebel without a cause who has suddenly found one (and then two). The cast expands slowly, bringing in Marko's parents, a ghost-turned-baby-sitter, two reporters, a trashy romance author and a lot more besides. The story also follows the lives of several antagonists, most notably the bounty hunter known as the Will (and his companion, the meme-generating Lying Cat) and the noble, mildly psychotic android nobleman, Prince Robot IV. Over the course of these 54 issues the story twists and turns unexpectedly, all narrated with aplomb by the now grown-up Hazel.

This flashback device means that we know Hazel lives to see the end of the story, but everyone else is at risk. And really at risk. The series shows a George R.R. Martin Plus level of willingness to kill off established characters and bring in new ones at the drop of a hat. No-one is safe, which becomes increasingly clear as the series continues and long-running mainstays are dispatched, sometimes very unceremoniously indeed.

Whilst the story has a good line in carnage, it also has a great deal of heart. The series dwells a lot on the idea of family, not just biological but also accumulated, the lifelong friends we make along the way and those recurring people who keep showing up unexpectedly. Saga's grand science fantasy, war-torn backdrop is a compelling part of the experience, but the more interesting theme the series explores is that all of us - every single one - are the protagonist of our own personal saga, and how we live our lives determines how our roles will be seen by others: hero, villain, morally ambiguous bounty-hunter or bit-part extra.

Saga (*****) is a love story, a war story, a tragedy, a comedy, sometimes a vivid fever dream, often a touching story of family and childhood. It's an adult story about life, loss, literature and lovesickness. It's about the appreciation of fine boardgames and finer friends. It's certainly one of the best slices of science fiction and fantasy produced in this rapidly closing decade. Compendium One is available now in the UK and USA.

Note: Compendium One is meant to gather the entire first half of Saga into one (relatively) easy-to-read collection. The first 54 issues of the comic book are collected here, totalling 1,328 pages. Saga had previously been available as six-issue collections and larger hardcover volumes (each combining three collections), but this marks a good opportunity to jump aboard the Saga hype train if you haven't been sold on it so far. Compendium One is obviously huge though, and as a paperback-only release (for now) it puts a bit of a strain on the binding, which I can't see surviving too many rereads, especially if you're transporting it around. On that basis, the hardcover volumes which collect eighteen issues at a time (into still-chunky 400-page volumes) may be a better choice. It's also worth noting that Saga went on extended hiatus after issue 54 was released in mid-2018 and isn't due back until some time in 2020. From that point, it'll likely be another seven years until the series ends and another year or two beyond that before we get Compendium Two. More impatient readers might prefer to follow the volume format to get to the end of the story faster.