Four teenagers on bicycles in the 1980s stumbling on paranormal happenings… if you think you know what I’m talking about, guess again. There are stranger things out there than the hit Netflix series of the year.
If you haven’t yet checked out Paper Girls, which has been running since October 2015, you’re in for a treat: especially if you have binge-watched the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic hymn to horror, Stranger Things. Been stuck for things to do while impatiently waiting for the second season in 2017? Read this comic.
Paper Girls gives us a version of the 1980s, less based on reality and more on the crackly videotaped vision presented to us by Amblin films such as ET, The Goonies and Stand By Me, or Stephen King novels: a world simultaneously on the brink of a bright future, yet seemingly never far away from destroying itself utterly. It was a time of excess, success, greed and failure, and those fears seem darker still when viewed through the filter of horror fiction.
Paper Girls begins in the early hours of All Saints’ Day — the morning after that most sacred of American holidays, Halloween — as new girl Erin hits the streets of Stony Stream, Ohio, at stupid o’clock for her round delivering the Cleveland Preserver. That’s a newspaper, kids, ask your parents about it; and those wonderfully stuffed bags brimming with local newspapers place this story firmly in the pre-internet world of 1988.
As does the authentic dialogue and the wonderfully realised looks and clothes of Erin and the three other paper girls she meets up with — coolly offhand Mac, goodie-goodie Tiffany and hockey stick-wielding KJ — who team up to help each other out on the post-Halloween delivery when “there are so many crazies still out”.
But drunk teenagers are nothing to what the girls face on that first night: grotesquely deformed strangers swaddled in rags, pterodactyl-riding spacemen, the disappearance of most of the townfolk, and the sudden appearance of strange pieces of technology bearing a logo of an apple with a neat bite taken out … and that’s pretty much all in the first issue.
Paper Girls is published by Image Comics and has a creative team that gels as rock-solidly as the kids in the movie Stand By Me. Writer Brian K Vaughan has penned some of the most critically acclaimed series of recent years, including Saga (also for Image, with Fiona Staples) and the Vertigo/DC series Y: The Last Man. His plotting on Paper Girls is second to none, and lays subplot trails with an artistry that would be earning him all kinds of mainstream accolades if this were a Netflix series and not a comic book.
But the look of Paper Girls is utterly gorgeous as well. Artist Cliff Chiang, previously best known for his work on Wonder Woman for DC, has created an utterly captivating and authentic 1988 world, and the colours by Matt Wilson are astonishing — blocky, duotone covers, interiors rendered in cool blues and yellows, evoking that autumnal pre-dawn feel when most of the action occurs. Even Jared K Fletcher’s lower-case lettering adds to the muted atmosphere, somehow more in keeping with how 12-year-old girls might communicate, rather than the shouty, blocky capitals of other comics.
With its 10th issue due to drop on 5 October, Paper Girls is a triumph, and between that and Stranger Things, the 80s are looking way cooler from 2016 than they actually were for those of us who grew up in them.
