Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn (graphic novel, 800 pages) is a massive graphic novel I’d heard about in passing but never read until now.

“Paper Girls follows the story of four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls (Erin, MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany) set in Stony Stream, a fictional suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. As they are out delivering papers on the morning after Halloween, the town is struck by an invasion from a mysterious force from the future. The girls become unwillingly caught up in the conflict between two warring factions of time travelers.”

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY **NOT** A SPOILER FREE REVIEW

There’s a lot of nostalgia going around right now for those who were young in the 1980s and this story is reminiscent of that, with the first issues of this monthly comic produced in October 2015, a full year before Stranger Things aired, and also takes place in the midwest.

When I first started reading this graphic novel, I had no idea what was going on. I thought the name Paper Girls might have been some sort of word comment about the paper cut out dolls from when I was younger? Something about maybe how girls were seen as two-dimensional and only useful for accessorizing? That was certainly incorrect, as the term Paper Girls actually refers to these four young women who are out delivering papers first thing in the morning after Halloween. It’s been so long since paper delivery was even a thing that I never even though about the people back in the 1980s and 1990s who actually delivered the papers. And the fact that newspapers would actually employ people as young as twelve? I’m not surprised.

This was probably the most fascinating look at time travel I’ve seen in any media, as everything in this story is cyclical. This was such a deep and complex story with fantastic, flawed, and realistic characters. These characters were dirty and messy and confused and everything it means to be young and trying your best to survive in a world of science fiction with no right answer.

I’d like to hope that they do actually change their future – that by stopping the generational interference and time war, maybe they buy back a little of their lives. When they first meet the adult Erin in 2016, she’s 30-40 years old, still living in Stony Creek, unmarried, and still working for a crappy salary with the same paper, and it doesn’t seem like she has many friends or anyone she talks with outside her extremely successful pilot sister, Missy. When they meet adult Tiffany in 2000, she’s struggling just to make ends meet and is back to living with her parents. The only future KJ in the story is the one near the end who is a clone of the original and used to help broker the peace arrangement and there’s no future Mackenzie to meet because of the time-traveler disease she dies of which their time thinks is leukemia.

Both future Erin and future Tiffany say the Paper Girls never really interacted again after that morning but I like to hope that Erin changes that by encouraging them all to ride together for the next hour or so before school starts. You can tell that each of them are changed by their time travel experiences, even though they don’t remember the actual adventure. The beginning of the story starts with Mackenzie as a foul-mouthed homophobe but in the same scenario at the end of the story, she’s mindful of her comments and I think she probably remembers her dream of KJ’s Bat Mitzvah and it left an impression on her.

Meanwhile, Tiffany actually turns off the video game instead of playing the final level and she thinks about actually spending some time living her life, which I think is a different path than what made her become the Tiffany they meet in 2000. And Erin does exactly what her older self suggested, which was to work harder to put herself out there and give people a chance.

Even though Heck and Naldo tell the Paper Girls that you can’t change your fate, maybe this time, they do. Maybe that last fourth dimension green eyeball thing touched Mackenzie before they all got brainwiped and sent back to 1988. Maybe it cured her of the time disease and she gets many more years ahead of her and has a better chance of a more fulfilling future.

I’d like to hope so.

Anyway.

Overall, this has become one of my favorite graphic novels and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread it since I impulse purchased it some time ago. It’s easily a five on my rating scale and one of those few stories my brain continues to chomp on, even though I’ve reread it so many times. I’m glad I bought it and will probably continue to reread it for a very, very long time.

Vaughn, Brian K. Paper Girls. Artist Cliff Chiang, Colorist Matt Wilson, Letterer and Designer Jared K. Fletcher. Image Comics, 2021.