Jesus, this series is fantastic.
Paper Girls #3 (Image Comics)
BREAK CHANNEL. WE GOT AN ALIEN OR TIME TRAVELER ASS WHUPPING COMING IN HOT.
Let’s review. We’ve got 80’s teenage girls, who deliver papers (thus…the title), and they’ve found a strange device that looks very familiar to us of the Ought-Teens (wait, what the hell do we call this decade?), along with potential time travelers/aliens. Oh and there’s flying dinosaurs coming through a hole in the sky, and a ton of people have just disappeared.
Okay, we’re caught up.
Pushing forward in the best Goonies/80’s movie fashion, our girls are now simultaneously trying to get to the bottom of just what the hell is going on outside, where all the adults are, and fix a pretty serious injury to one of their own. We even see them branching farther out in their rule breaking, by boosting a car:
“Can you shut your damn mouth? I’m 12 and so doing 40 feels like light speed!”
I loved this issue. BKV’s usual witty dialog is snapping and crackling and popping along, and Cliff Chiang’s art makes this book shine for me. I can FEEL everything, from the classic wood-paneled station wagon above, to this Marty McFly wannabe’s entire outfit:
“You’re a cat? That’s so heavy”
This is what my imagination looks like. Seriously. This is tapping into some weird undercurrent of those of us, raised on Voltron and Tranzor-Z, grew into. Like some pop culture collective unconscious. Many of my fellow comic dork compadres are in the same boat, feeling something pull at a younger and adolescent side of them they didn’t know they could still tap into.
Is It…YES GO GET IT.
It’s brilliant. 10 out of 10. It keeps getting better each issue. The plot is dripping out just enough to keep us on the edge of our seats, but we’re also getting more and more reveals that seem to turn the preconceived world on its head…every damn issue!
I can’t reccommend this highly enough. If they can keep this up, this will become one of those Halloween staples for me that I dip into every year, like some families read Night Before Christmas on Fat Elf Eve.
Finally, if you’re so interested, there are a few sites that are translating the Alien/Time dialog, or providing a decoder for you to do so yourself. The one I’ve been using is Papergirls Decoded, and you can try decoding this splash page:
“Drink…your….Ovaltine?”
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