Paper Girls is Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's outstanding, Stranger Things-esque all-girl time-travel adventure comic, and after four years, the pair have completed the story, tying up the increasingly complicated braided timelines of their tale in a fantastically satisfying bow.
Paper Girls tells the tale of a group of young girls who deliver a local newspaper in 1980s Cleveland, facing down bullies, sexism, and parents, but whose lives change when, one morning, they are catapulted into a time-travel adventure that has them ranging up and down the timeline from the human race's earliest days to the very last moments of our planet, as they become pivotal figures in an existential war between time-travelers from different eras.
On the way, they encounter their older selves (and clones of themselves) as well as dinosaurs, mecha warriors, hotshot space pilots, and all manner of treachery and skullduggery, as well as romance, bravery, self-sacrifice, and crises personal and global.
Vaughan and Chiang get into some varsity-level time-travel weirdness, too, with lots of braided timelines that they need to tie up in this final volume, something they accomplish with virtuoso flair, across a series of multi-page spreads divided into horizontal slices that show the protagonists in four different times and places at the story's climax, a piece of dazzling visual storytelling that is worth all six volumes on its own.
Paper Girls won Best New Series when it debuted in 2015, and it's lived up to that promise. Now that the tale is complete, it's a perfect time to re-read it from start to finish (the six collections' covers piece together to make a single, giant image, hinting at lots more premeditated goodies that will pay off now the project's over), or to gift the set to a friend.
Paper Girls Volume 6 [Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang/Image]
Previous reviews:
* Volume 3
* Volume 4
* Volume 5
