Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang

apologies for the recent interruption to regular Triumph Of The Now.com service – an unexpected death occurred in my family and so I was away and unable to work on the blog for several weeks. It will not be addressed in this post as it was drafted (but not edited/published, obviously) prior to the loss.

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One of the strongest emotive responses I’ve had to a character death in the last few years of my life is when a person is, unexpectedly, though not impossibly, shot dead towards the end of Brian K Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man.

I got a full trade paperback set of that long-running comic in bulk (and secondhand) at a very low price from a Parkdale comic book store that didn’t survive the pandemic (recent trips back to that part of Toronto have left me saddened to see the retail unit briefly turned into a matcha-led bakery and then, later, once again vacant (which somehow felt nice)) and I read most of the second half of it in a single night, distraught by the end and relieved, yes, somehow very relieved, when Vaughan managed to find a narratively satisfying way to explain why one “biological human male” had survived the “biological male” destroying virus without falling into any “chosen one” tropes¹.

That comic book series, like Paper Girls, has also had a high budget TV adaptation begin and then get cancelled after a single season. Both of them almost certainly for the same reason, which is that neither of them centre the worldview (or lives) of cis-gendered heterosexual white men (there is literally only one of them alive in Y: The Last Man and in Paper Girls they are all only ever periphery).

Brian K Vaughan’s other, even more acclaimed and (I believe) still running, comic book series is Saga, which has not (yet) been trialled in adaptation. That one I haven’t read much of, though I’ve never had access to a big bulk of it, which is maybe what I need to feel engaged and sucked in by a narrative. This version of Paper Girls contains the whole thing, all 30 issues, originally published month by month from October 2015 to July 2019.

This isn’t the first time I’ve read this, actually, though Paper Girls is – for reasons I honestly can’t remember why – one of the very very very few books I’ve read since Spring 2013 that I didn’t post about here² (though I definitely remember posting an image of a panel online that contains someone who’s travelled through time saying “What’s a jenekksor?” to a Gen Xer, and it’s a phrase that remains in my personal vocabulary, even if I’ve never met anyone else who has any idea what the hell that might mean³).

I read Paper Girls the first time in, essentially, a single sitting, during the slightly looser of the two pandemic Christmases⁴, sat snuggled in a large chair in Southern Ontario, next to my in-laws’ very lovely and (sadly now deceased) big spaniel named after a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

I wept, I cried, I wailed, yes, and I laughed too (especially at that “jenekksor” line), and I absolutely loved it. I’ve recommended Paper Girls to people many times in the half-decade since, though have never (until now) revisited it, and never bothered to collate some notes on it here.

The reason why I came back to it, yes, is because my toddler (who didn’t exist when I read this before) loves books.

He loves being read to, and he also loves to pretend to read.

But my toddler, Whamathan, likes to read the same books over and over, and many of them are very narratively light, and even those that aren’t often have a certain lack of meaningful characterisation.

There are counter examples, of course: Max in Where The Wild Things Are has clear character development and a meaningful personal psychological journey alongside his physical (well, metaphysical(?) one); in Hairy Maclary and Zachary Quack (which I will do a whole post on one day when my life’s a bit more organised again (which it isn’t at all rn)), there’s a real powerhouse of personhood rising… In the work of Robert Munsch, a Canadian writer whose oeuvre I’ve been introduced to via my half-Canadian (though wholly *a* Canadian) child, there is great depth and nuance.

But outside of these examples, there’s also a lotta crap, and a weird amount of contemporary children’s books have a frankly patronising and deeply unhelpful kinda cognitive behavioural therapy structure and twist to them. I don’t want to read children’s books that teach/preach that happiness is a state of mind, that behaving like you’re happy makes you happy. For me, it’s offensive. A good attitude does not a dull life fix. imo.

And so, yes, I pulled this large and often colourful book off the shelf in the hope that sharing it with my small child might be a pleasant mutual activity.

It quickly became clear that it wasn’t, and gave me a nice lesson about the impossibility of the fiction I’d been telling myself that full page spreads of images might be enough to make graphic novels and comic books something that both my toddler and I could equally enjoy. He said, though, very clearly (not with words): no. “No, we will not be reading Paper Girls together. I will not be tricked into reading things that are mostly for you, parent, rather than books that are mostly for me,” he said. And so that was the end of that.

But I’d done something significant, though: I’d reminded myself that I did, yes, I did want to re-read Paper Girls, and even though I picked one of the busiest sets of weeks I’ve had in years that meant I only had occasional late night bursts of 15 minutes to do so (this book is too big to carry around), I very quickly realised this was a decision I was not going to regret…

Paper Girls is about four 1980s “paper girls” – 12 year old newspaper delivery workers – who accidentally get embroiled in an inter-generational, inter-dimensional, time war.

The people of the era that first invented time travel are travelling back and forth through time, trying to stop anyone else from travelling through time and changing it. They are doing mass memory wipes and what amount to mass kidnappings, in order to make sure that the repercussions of their time war doesn’t effect non-combatants. Centuries (millennia, maybe?) later, another group is doing the opposite, travelling back and forth in time trying to change as much as possible to make the world better.

The four paper girls meet people from both sides of the Time War, they see the very end of the world, they visit the planet when humanity was new, and they hit up their home town (Cleveland – anybody been?) in 2000, in 2016, and in several other years between then and the end of time. 

They have adventures, they have battles with (and while controlling) giant robots. They make friends, they make enemies, there is romance and growth and self-knowledge and gaining a finer and wiser understanding of life and the world, whatever the year is. 

It’s a beautiful book, very sad in places, really, because it is often about competing ideas of hope; I think the reason why the time war here functions so narratively well and why the later scenes of reconciliation between the sides don’t feel forced is this: the beliefs that compete are partially aligned. One side believes “the world could be better and let’s do everything we can to try to make that happen”, while the other holds to “the world could be even worse, let’s do everything we can to prevent that”.

Burning things down and starting again appeals to me, and to the generally young[er] members of the side advocating the second position in the novel. And though the side trying to keep timelines stable and consistent are (maybe) merely doing it out of idle conservatism, Vaughan and team also dramatises that they are definitely (also) doing it out of a genuine fear of consequence, of mistake, of regret.

I wept, I laughed, I loved it.

At some point, I’ll read it again. At some point, I’ll get my child to read it.

I like time travel stories, when they’re good. And this one, honestly, is one of the best…

Highly recommended. Yes.

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1. SPOILER ALERT, but a lovely joke for anyone who has read all of that: the reason is shit. Yet it works, it coheres, it holds. ↩︎
2. Usually this happens when I read something a person who’s been nice and/or friendly and/or is clearly a good person (by my definition, which is subjective) has written and I think it’s shit, OR it happens when I think something is so good that I want to write about it seriously and at length but I’m not able to make it happen. ↩︎
3. I don’t know anyone else, really, who reads comic books. These days I don’t really know anyone who reads much of anything that I read, really. Though what do I read??? What would I be reading if I was choosing every book anew as opposed to grabbing things that are to hand rather than choosing them in time with my life? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not in a position to buy books atm (which is fine as I definitely have plenty) which does mean I miss out on nice new shiny indie press texts, which is what I want, I think. I’d like to get back into a literary community again, I think. But will I??? Will I??? Who knows? Probably not, though I do really need to start doing something to feel more alive in a meaningful way again soon, as I’m really not loving life atm and I’m too busy to give it up, annoyingly. ↩︎
4. There were definitely two pandemic Christmases in Canada – I think possibly the UK had just entirely given up on disease prevention measures by the second one I experienced? ↩︎