Review:
With this sixth and final volume, the complete story of these four newspaper delivery girls from a Cleveland suburb in the late 1980s reaches its fitting end. The creative team of writer Brian K Vaughan, artist Cliff Chiang and colorist Matt Wilson have taken us on a thrilling 30-issue ride, and what they accomplished in these pages has rightly received a multitude of awards, from best new series to best writer, best penciller/inker and best colorist. All well-deserved, this series is a moving and beautiful work of comics art!
Our fearless foursome has grown so much in just a few days. They have discovered new depths of courage and bravery, they have learned self-sacrifice and teamwork, they have even killed and been shot at. But most of all they have discovered and fostered a tight bond, clinging together for support and survival in all the wild adventures to this point.
But the biggest test has a more individual component - future-clone Erin's time bomb at the end of the previous volume has sent them all to different times. KJ has landed in a rough-and-tumble 1950s, so it's a good thing she has discovered her bad-ass streak in recent days. Erin found herself in our contemporary era, with Hallowe'en revelers dressed in modern costumes like a Donald Trump mask. Tiffany wound up in the more distant future, pulled into a small band of women - their future selves - trying to restore the timelines and end the war. And Mac has been blasted into the far, far future, the dying moments of planet Earth. Now the challenge of getting everyone back home has become much harder!
With our heroes in four very different times, the award-winning creative team takes their creativity to the next level. One whole chapter is told in parallel, with each page laid out as a stack of four horizontal panels, one for each of the girls in each of their times. It's a novel approach, and they pull it off, inviting the reader to read each character's arc separately, or to marvel at the symmetry between their situations by taking in the tale page by page. A daring and inventive approach to storytelling, and they stick the landing! Which should be no surprise at this point, the inventiveness of the visuals, the powerful use of color, even down to the carefully crafted letters of the future-teen speech bubbles, demonstrates the great skill, care and attention to detail as Vaughan, Chiang and Wilson (and a nod to letterer Jared K. Fletcher!) have pulled off a brilliantly entertaining, wild ride of a story.
In these six reviews, I have compared the Paper Girls story to a 1980s-era after-school special, with elements of the Twilight Zone and Doctor Who swirled in. Fittingly, the story ends back in the land of after-school friendship drama. The price the girls paid for their safe return home was to have their memories reset, so they would remember none of these bizarre adventures. And they knew from their future selves that they drifted apart, that the bonds of friendship forged in these fires did not hold.
And yet, back in their right times and with no such memories, one of them risks embarrassment and rejection and asks the others to just hang out together for a few more minutes. And they do. It's a beautiful and poignant end to a phenomenal series.
Description:
THE END IS HERE!
After surviving adventures in their past, present and future, the Paper Girls of 1988 embark on one last journey, a five-part epic that includes the emotional double-sized series finale. Featuring a new wraparound cover from Eisner Award-winning co-creator CLIFF CHIANG, which can be combined with the covers of all five previous volumes to form one complete mega-image!
Collects: Issues #26-30
Authors: Brian K Vaughan
Artists: Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson
Published By: Image Comics
Published When: Oct. 1, 2019
Parental Rating: Teen
ISBN: 978-1534313248
Pages: 144 pages
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