The Year of the (Paper) Dragon: a review of Paper Girls

Paper Girls

Created by Stephany Folsom

Based on Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang

Main

Camryn Jones as Tiffany “Tiff” Quilkin

Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng

Sofia Rosinsky as Mackenzie “Mac” Coyle

Fina Strazza as Karina J. “KJ” Brandman

Adina Porter as Prioress

Recurring

Ali Wong as Adult Erin

Nate Corddry as Larry

Sekai Abenì as Adult Tiffany

Guest

Jason Mantzoukas as Grand Father

Music by Bobby Krlic

Country of origin United States

Original language English

Executive producers Stephany Folsom,Christopher C. Rogers, Christopher Cantwell, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Christina Oh, Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Steve Prinz

Producer Vail Romeyn

Production companies Future Investigations, Sorry Dave Productions, Sic Semper Tyrannis, Plan B Entertainment, Legendary Television, Amazon Studios

Distributor Amazon Studios

Release Amazon Prime Video July 29, 2022

Brian K. Vaughn is one of the most lauded comic authors around. His Saga series won a whole raft of awards, including the Hugo. Y: The Last Man came earlier, and platformed his rise to prominence in the field. Prior to that, there was Paper Girls, which attracted a loyal and enthusiastic fan base, but didn’t break out of the genre market. But the style, loopy, wild, imaginative and deeply human, was already there.

Vaughn has said publicly that he deliberately set out to make Saga an impossible project for film or television. That doesn’t preclude an animated series at some point, I should think. And there’s already a television adaptation of Y: The Last Man that got ‘meh’ reviews and was canceled after one season. I admit I stopped watching after 7 of the 10 episodes. Vaughn’s characters are deep, complicated, and interact with one another in an intelligent and empathetic manner. Despite that, there is a sense of humor, sometimes wry and subtle, and sometimes outrageous and hilarious, that undertones the entire story. Those elements didn’t come though in the series, and the result was leaden, with unappealing characters. Frankly, the only character I liked was the rabbit.

That left Paper Girls as the next project. I can’t make comparisons to the comic because I haven’t read it. But Vaughn always brings wild plot devices, utterly fantastic worlds, and a loopy sense of absurdity to his work. He’s just terrific fun to read.

So I have to consider the TV series on its own merits and hope it’s not as disastrous a betrayal of its source material as M. Night Shyamalan’s was with Avatar: The Last Airbender. Of course, I didn’t have to watch the animation to know the movie was pure crap. That was self-evident.

This TV series is pretty damned good. A lot of people have compared it to Stranger Things, including Amazon who marketed it so as their response to the Netflix hit. But there are significant differences that make Paper Girls more interesting, and not at the expense of Stranger Things.

The storylines are wildly different. Paper Girls is essentially a time travel story. Four 12 year old girls are delivering newspapers in the pre-dawn hours on November 1^st, 1988. Because it is “Hell Day,” the day after Halloween, and because there are a lot of mischief-makers about, some of whom are pretty malevolent, the girls have banded together for safety. They are attacked by two men wearing hoods, and get away by escaping to an under-construction home. They encounter a strange device and the sky turns a weird purple color. Even for Cleveland in 1988 that’s unusual. One of the girls, Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) brandishes a gun and accidentally shoots Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) in the stomach. The hooded guys show up and kidnap the girls to a forest, where another set of characters show up and kills the hooded guys. They heal Erin, but in the confusion KJ (Fina Strazza) kills one with a lacrosse stick. They then get away and run to Erin’s house, only to find it’s occupied by a middle-aged woman who looks a bit like Erin. And so the displaced-in-time tale begins.

Three of the kids meet older versions of themselves as the series goes along, and find themselves perplexed, confused and sometimes horrified by what they are destined to become. The encounters teach the viewer much about the hopes, dreams, and character of the three girls/women they become, making for a full-fleshed and deeply personal drama. One of the girls, Mac, doesn’t meet her older self. She finds that she died at age 16 from brain cancer. It’s an incredibly demanding role, and Rosinsky rises to the occasion beautifully.

The girls start out as tropes (Overachieving black kid who wants to go to MIT, Jewish-American princess, insecure doesn’t-fit-in Chinese American girl, and socially disaffected tomboy) but the characters grow, both as people and on the viewer. They are deeper and darker than the kids’ roles in Stranger Things.

There are the loony Vaughn touches that inform his comics (yes, giant mecha robots for the win!) and a mordant humor that brightens the sharp edges of his characters. This story, no matter how true to the source, is told the way Y: The Last Man should have been told.

One sort-of spoiler: the series ends on a very “to be continued” note. Obviously a second season is in the works, needs to be.

I know I’ll watch. I’m really impressed by how it has begun.

Starting tomorrow: Netflix begins airing its adaptation of the greatest comic series of all time: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.