Writer Brian K. Vaughan's and artist/illustrator Cliff Chiang's latest pulp comic, Paper Girls, is a euphoric trip to one's teenage past, especially if one was born in late 70s or early 80s. The four heroines of the title are a curious bunch, girls who were perhaps born a decade too early, but are nonetheless perfect embodiments of their time: rebellious, naive in their adolescent expectations of the world, and not at all as tough as they think they are. They're this generation's opposite sex version of the Stand By Me boys' quartet.
From its opening pages, it's easy to see we're in the hands of the celebrated author of Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and the current ongoing series, Saga. His writing is always original, sharp and full of various pop-culture references, which are appropriately peppered with just the right amount of profanity. The main character here, Erin, is an imaginative girl whose dreams and fantasies consist of meeting angel astronauts and President Ronald Reagan. The quartet that she belongs to also consists of MacKenzie, a chain smoking, potty-mouthed, short hair ginger badass who curses like a sailor anytime she isn't consumed my the music in her walkman; there's also KJ, a knowledgeable sci-fi geek (she hysterically refers to the great Orson Welles as "Orville Wright") who is sure that the strange and mysterious events happening in their little town of Stony Stream are somehow associated with War of the Worlds broadcast's fiftieth anniversary; and finally we have Tiffany, a cynical African American girl who knows her horror movie references, and who's all too easily willing to drive a car - something that her young years would otherwise keep her from even considering - when Erin's is fatally wounded by accident. Add to this equation two strange looking teenage boys - who may or may not be aliens from the future - a series of mysterious dragons hovering all too ominously over Stony Stream, and an enigmatic old man (a sort of a Jerry Garcia lookalike) in a Rock'n Roll black T-shirt - who seems to know a whole lot that we don't - and we have ourselves a sci-fi mystery that follows the general plot-line of (somewhat) recent movies such as The Watch and Attack the Block, at least to some degree.
Unlike Vaughan's previous works, Paper Girls doesn't have many connotations about current or even prior US political climate, but then again the serial is still young, so I suppose it's not too late to incorporate such commentary in future episodes. The aliens, dragons and strange corporate brands (what exactly is the significance of the Apple logo the girls find?) we are exposed to here are still as mysterious as the ultimate direction of this sci-fi pulp fest, which, if the ending of this first volume is any indication, will involve some serious time traveling paradoxes. I just hope that the girls' remaining journey is as enigmatic and entertaining as their Goonies-like leap into the kooky world of the late 1980s bland, suburban landscape of the fantastic and the surreal.
B
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