Paper Girls 4

 
 
Paper Girls 4

by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics
2018
 
  

In volume 4 of Paper Girls, I think we finally start getting some clear information about what's been happening across the previous volumes, thanks to a helpful true believer who tries to indoctrinate the girls to her side. The new info helps make sense of what we've seen up to this point. Til now, we've mostly been along for the ride as the girls were menaced by a baffling conflict going on around them. We still are, really, but at least we're starting to understand the conflict!

 

In the first volume, the girls' suburban Cleveland neighborhood was invaded by strangeness the morning after Halloween in 1988. We saw that the two factions were mutated teenagers dressed like ninjas or burglars, and an army of knights riding pterodactyls. The future teens language is incomprehensible without a translator; the knights speak a barely intelligible version of English that reads like online forum slang. The knights are led by an old man who sounds perfectly contemporary and can barely understand his own troops.

 

We now know this is the War of the Ages, fought between the Old Timers, who want to avoid making any consequential changes to history, and their own descendants, who want to use time travel to change things. The linguistic drift we see suggests how long a span of future history we're dealing with here. The Old Timers have robots that can repair property damage, and to keep people from witnessing anything, they teleport them into stasis pods and use amnesia rays to erase anything out of place. They want to fight the teens whenever they show up, and use their tech to keep the fight itself from being recorded or remembered. We're told that the teens want to change history for the better, although we've mostly seen them stealing, perhaps supplies or maybe just souvenirs.

 

The girls time traveled by accident and arrived in 2016 in volume two. They met Erin's adult-self and also a future-teen who was a clone of Erin. Mac learned she has as-yet undiagnosed cancer and only a few years to live. The future clone accidentally brought tardigrades with her, and even more accidentally, they arrived as giants that began destroying downtown Cleveland. That brought in the Old Timers, flying a giant airship like a cathedral. 

 

The girls got sent through time again, appearing in the Stone Age in volume 3. They met a cavegirl their own age (who they could speak to using one of the translators) and the woman who invented time travel, on the very first trip. Unfortunately, the past was already littered with future junk when she arrived. Based on the two factions' philosophies, I'd guess the abandoned tech was left behind by the future teens. Touching an anomaly gave KJ a brief, kaleidoscopic vision of events from her own future, including kissing Mac. KJ was surprised and shaken by the vision. The scientist was killed by a caveman, but the girls used her time machine to escape.

 

Now in volume 4, they arrive back home, but on New Years Eve in the year 1999. In the comic, the Y2K bug caused mass power outages and other infrastructure shut-downs. Also, giant robots are fighting in the Cleveland suburbs, but only Tiffany can see them! Half the robots are being piloted by future teens, and half by the Old Timers. The leader, who we've always seen as an old man, is still young here, and the pterodactyl breeding program isn't finished yet. From his perspective, this battle happens early in his career. For the teens who met the girls in volume 1, I think this fight is immediately before that meeting; they retreat backward in time when their mecha is damaged.

 

The girls meet an elderly cartoonist who lives in their neighborhood. She met the future teens when she was a kid, and she's become a fanatical believer in their perspective on the war. They also meet Tiffany's college-age self. She grows up to be a goth! With a White boyfriend! The girls get into the damaged, abandoned mecha and it takes them further into the future, where the leader of the Old Timers is waiting. That particular mecha killed his copilot (who begged him, with her dying words, to hold fast to their principles and not overwrite her death), and he wants revenge. Hopefully he'll learn that it has a new pilot before he destroys it!

 

 

You'll want to break out the decoder ring for this one, because the future teens have kind of a lot of dialogue. It's depicted using a substitution code, with strange symbols replacing familiar letters. It takes a bit of time and effort matching the symbols to figure out what they're saying. The effect is interesting. Each symbol is complicated, looking more like a Chinese ideogram than an English letter. So the future teens' speech bubbles look like they're saying a lot. Somehow when I look at the symbols, the way it's written makes what they're saying look technical and complex, or maybe angry and warlike. Then I translate it and I see they mostly speak in short words and simple sentences, and most of what they're saying is just simple expressions of surprise or dismay. There's dramatic irony in the contrast.

 

Things are pretty tangled at this point, especially with the revelation that the order that we (and the girls) are seeing events in doesn't match the order the factions perceive them, and that the factions also have different timelines of events from each other. Time travel plots are frequently confusing, and this one has more interweaving than most.