Paper Girls 3
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang
2017
In the third volume of Brian Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls comic, the girls find themselves 10,000 years in the past, where they meet a cavegirl their own age, and the first person to ever travel through time, a woman scientist born in the 2010s.
Much to the scientist's horror, her maiden voyage is to a past already despoiled by travelers from further in the future. Not only are teen girls from the 1980s already there when she first arrives, but a trio of menacing cavemen (collectively, the fathers of the cavegirl's infant child) are wearing space helmets and are using the Playstation controller button symbols to decorate themselves.
In Paper Girls volume 1, we first met the girls as they met up in their Cleveland suburb to ride their paper routes together, the morning after Halloween in the late 1980s. New kid Erin was introduced to KJ, Tiffany, and tough-girl Mac, who's kind of the group leader. Weird things started happening! Everyone else was frozen in place, and then started disappearing, with only the paper girls unaffected. White knights riding pterodactyls patrolled the skies, and a small gang of black-clad teenagers from the far future ran around looking for things to steal. When the teens' time machine exploded, the paper girls were accidentally sent to the 2010s.
Luckily, in volume 2, the first person they met was a middle-aged Erin, who took them in until they could figure out what's going on. Another future teen, this one a clone of Erin arrived, and accidentally brought some giant tardigrades through time with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown Cleveland, which caught the attention of the time traveling pterodactyl knights. The knights are led by an old hippie who operates out of a giant airship cathedral.
Dramatic as they look, they seem to be trying to prevent changes to history. The heavy-handed tactic of putting every potential witness into some kind of temporary stasis seems to be in service of that goal. We don't know why the girls aren't affected, about Erin's clone suggested the reason she is a clone is so she could piggyback off of whatever's protecting Erin. While the airship and flying knights fought a city-destroying tardigrade, the girls fell through a hole in time created by all the disturbances.
Now in volume 3, we don't see either of the warring factions at all, we just see hints of how much they've time traveled based on the apparent changes to the prehistoric past. The girls get separated, with Erin and Tiffany meeting the cavegirl and then the time traveling scientist. KJ and Mac encounter a strange creature that looks like an inverted pyramid with tentacles. KJ touches it, and sees visions of her future, including her and Mac kissing, which troubles her, because she didn't realize she likes girls, and Mac is vocally homophobic. (Mac is also dying - in the 2010s she learned she has leukemia and only a couple years to live. She's trying to act tougher than usual to cover her fear.)
KJ is slightly able to play off her sudden awkwardness as being caused by getting her first ever period while trapped in the Stone Age, although Mac, who's never had any sex ed because her Catholic family disapproves, is super curious. They manage to reunite with the others, agree to protect the cavegirl from the trio of cavemen, and agree to help the scientist get back to her time machine, which Mac and KJ saw earlier. Things don't go as planned! In the end, the time machine leaves on autopilot without the scientist, and the paper girls get caught up in it's wake and transported somewhere new.
In the third volume of Brian Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls comic, the girls find themselves 10,000 years in the past, where they meet a cavegirl their own age, and the first person to ever travel through time, a woman scientist born in the 2010s.
Much to the scientist's horror, her maiden voyage is to a past already despoiled by travelers from further in the future. Not only are teen girls from the 1980s already there when she first arrives, but a trio of menacing cavemen (collectively, the fathers of the cavegirl's infant child) are wearing space helmets and are using the Playstation controller button symbols to decorate themselves.
In Paper Girls volume 1, we first met the girls as they met up in their Cleveland suburb to ride their paper routes together, the morning after Halloween in the late 1980s. New kid Erin was introduced to KJ, Tiffany, and tough-girl Mac, who's kind of the group leader. Weird things started happening! Everyone else was frozen in place, and then started disappearing, with only the paper girls unaffected. White knights riding pterodactyls patrolled the skies, and a small gang of black-clad teenagers from the far future ran around looking for things to steal. When the teens' time machine exploded, the paper girls were accidentally sent to the 2010s.
Luckily, in volume 2, the first person they met was a middle-aged Erin, who took them in until they could figure out what's going on. Another future teen, this one a clone of Erin arrived, and accidentally brought some giant tardigrades through time with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown Cleveland, which caught the attention of the time traveling pterodactyl knights. The knights are led by an old hippie who operates out of a giant airship cathedral.
Dramatic as they look, they seem to be trying to prevent changes to history. The heavy-handed tactic of putting every potential witness into some kind of temporary stasis seems to be in service of that goal. We don't know why the girls aren't affected, about Erin's clone suggested the reason she is a clone is so she could piggyback off of whatever's protecting Erin. While the airship and flying knights fought a city-destroying tardigrade, the girls fell through a hole in time created by all the disturbances.
Now in volume 3, we don't see either of the warring factions at all, we just see hints of how much they've time traveled based on the apparent changes to the prehistoric past. The girls get separated, with Erin and Tiffany meeting the cavegirl and then the time traveling scientist. KJ and Mac encounter a strange creature that looks like an inverted pyramid with tentacles. KJ touches it, and sees visions of her future, including her and Mac kissing, which troubles her, because she didn't realize she likes girls, and Mac is vocally homophobic. (Mac is also dying - in the 2010s she learned she has leukemia and only a couple years to live. She's trying to act tougher than usual to cover her fear.)
KJ is slightly able to play off her sudden awkwardness as being caused by getting her first ever period while trapped in the Stone Age, although Mac, who's never had any sex ed because her Catholic family disapproves, is super curious. They manage to reunite with the others, agree to protect the cavegirl from the trio of cavemen, and agree to help the scientist get back to her time machine, which Mac and KJ saw earlier. Things don't go as planned! In the end, the time machine leaves on autopilot without the scientist, and the paper girls get caught up in it's wake and transported somewhere new.
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