COMICS: Paper Girls #1

Sometimes, when I'm looking for a new comic to read, I take a leap based on little more than blind faith and hope.  So far, it's done pretty well for me, and while several of the series I picked up were sadly limiteds and have defined ends (damn it, The Infinite Loop, I need more of you and Teddy and Ano, like, yesterday), I can't say I've picked up anything that hasn't rewarded my reading.

One I took one of those flying leaps on, and just got the first issue of, is Paper Girls, from Image Comics.  It is, if I remember correctly, described as a young adult adventure...and if that scares you off, then I don't know what to tell you.  Plenty of the best stories have had, at their core, a group of teenagers with discovery of just how big (and terrifying) the world really is.  While this is simply issue one, I think there's some hope this will be a good one.

Our core crew is a quartet of newspaper delivery girls on Halloween 1988...a time I remember all too well as being entirely confusing and totally not fitting in anywhere.  It's not a time I'd go back to willingly, and it's recreated here in fine detail.  Erin, KJ, Mac and Tiffany are our main characters, each as different from each other as possible, bound by the singular fact that they deliver the same newspaper.  When Erin is harassed by a bunch of older teens, the feckless trio come upon the scene, chase them off, and offer her a place in their little group...an offer she seems to take up pretty quickly.

Mac, who seems to be the leader of the crew, is what my mum would have called a 'bad influence.'  Short hair, Wax!Trax Records shirt, Doc Martins and smoking, she calls the shots.  KJ would be the athlete of the group, it seems, with her field hockey stick slung across her back, while Tiffany would be the technical support with her Radio Shack 2-way radios and allsorts.  Erin, who seems to take the place of audience analogue, has her own quirks, as evidenced by the opening pages and the nightmarish scenes that start this series off.

If we thought that things would settle down after the teens were chased off, we were pretty mistaken when, immediately after Mac is essentially told by a cop that she's end up no better than the rest of her family (a plotline I hope will be developed), she gets a call for help across radio.  Mac and Erin speed off to find KJ tending to an injures Tiffany, who had been jumped by another group of older teens who happened to also steal her 2-way.  Mac is pissed, and warns them over the radio that they're coming for them, and for their stuff.

Without wanting to reveal much more, this is where the weird really hits the road, and we veer wildly into left field.

Firstly, as you could probably guess, I love our main characters.  I think they're pretty well written, and I'm sure future issues will only deepen their characters.  I know I already worry that one or more of them are going to get hurt through the telling of the tale, and I don't want to see that happen.

I love how weird the story is.  Weird can mean so many things, but in my case I am using it in the manner of Weird Tales and stories of that early ilk, with unknown (and unknowable) things from Beyond.  It's the only way to really explain what is going on, and I hope it remains weird and doesn't settle into any standard tropes.  I think it would be awesome to have a weird YA story in the racks every month...or something at least to replace the weirdly wonderful Shadowgirls, which we never got a second series of.

:-(

The artwork by Cliff Chiang, with inks and colours by Matt Wilson, do a great job recreating that strange time between decades when the Soviet Union was falling apart, we suddenly had no military enemies (and so began creating new ones), and kids my age really had no idea what kind of world we'd get by the time we were our parent's age.  Brian Vaughan's story captures that perfectly for me, and I can only imagine where we're going with this story.

Definitely looking forward to Issue 2.

(Images courtesy Comic Book Resources)