Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #1! Happy Memorial Day! What better way to celebrate this patriotic nonsense than with a comic series that begins the morning after godless pagan Halloween?

I only became aware of this series recently. It comes highly recommended within the Image Comics oeuvre, and I’m all for a good coming-of-age story. Here’s all that I know: it’s set in the ‘80s, four girls go on an adventure, and time travel may be involved. The official description compares the series to both Stand By Me and War of the Worlds. Reviews have also mentioned Stranger Things. I’m intrigued.

This series spans thirty issues, with each chunk of the storyline comprising five issues. As far as I know, neither the storylines nor the issues themselves have names, which sends my OCD alarm into a complete fucking conniption fit! I almost skipped this entire series because of that!

But I decided to be the bigger man here and get over it! That’ll show me.

Paper Girls, Issue #1 [October, 2015]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

A girl wearing a one-piece swimsuit appears to be on Mars or something. She’s on her knees clutching an apple with two hands. A NASA astronaut with angel wings welcomes the girl to Heaven. The girl is named Erin.

Erin recognizes the astronaut angel. It’s none other than Christa McAuliffe, famous for dying in the Challenger shuttle explosion! Here in Heaven, all seven Challenger astronauts are here! Also, your grandma! But not your fish.

How did Erin die? Well, it was the Russians. “They got almost everybody.”

“Then… where’s my sister?” Erin asks, gazing sadly at her apple.
“Oh, Missy is in Hell,” says a blasé McAuliffe, “but you still have one chance to save her.”

Suddenly Erin is in a classroom where her younger sister is tied to a desk, held captive by a giant demony demon. Missy is speaking in tongues. All Erin has to do is answer the demon’s question:

1) WHICH TRIBE NAMED OUR “CROOKED RIVER” THE CUYAHOGA?

• THE MOHAWKS
• THE IROQUOIS
• THE APACHE
• THE BLACKFEET

Multiple choice test questions? I don’t love my sister that much.

Erin’s getting suspicious. She’s had this dream before! She’s not falling for any of it anymore.

Christa McAuliffe doesn’t approve of Erin’s swearing at all. She’s getting all angry about it, in fact! Erin doesn’t care. This isn’t even real anyway!

“Incorrect,” says the demon as it pierces right through Erin’s face with a long, sharp claw. Through one cheek and out the other.

“We warned you,” says astronaut angel McAuliffe, helmet visor now showing a horrendous vision of an inhuman skull, “never eat from the Tree of Knowledge.”

Boo!

Ha ha!

Erin wakes up. She’s got the top bunk. Her sister, Missy, safe and sound, is fast asleep in the bottom bunk.

“Missy? Are you dead?” asks Erin, peeking down from her elevated position. Missy shoots her a dirty look and turns back over.

It’s still dark outside, but a large newspaper truck blares its headlights through their bedroom window. “THE CLEVELAND STEAMER”. lol, no. “THE CLEVELAND PRESERVER”.

Her Far Side desk calendar shows Tuesday, November 1st, 1988. She pulls a knife out of her desk drawer (loaded also with cash bundles) and gets to work.

Time to throw all these down the sewer!

Today’s headline: “NO PROGRESS IN IRAN-IRAQ PEACE TALKS”.

It’s 4:40am.

Soon, all the newspapers are bundled in Erin’s papergirl sack and she hits the road on her Schwinny Schwin Schwin. Soon, all of Stony Stream, Ohio will get their morning news! Huzzah!

Just another normal morning on the paper route. That is, until some kids dressed in costumes and throwing eggs start harassing her. “Yo. Can I get one of those? You skipped my house,” says a weaselly Freddy Krueger with about six fluffy hairs on his chin.

Erin is on-guard. “Teenagers,” she mumbles.

“You’re not a Stony Middle chick, are you?” asks Krueger, who looks like Butt-Head. No, Erin goes to St. Nick’s. “Yum, Catholic schoolgirl,” says a kid dressed like a ninja.

Erin tries to leave, but Krueger grabs her bike. “Not until you give me a goddamn paper,” he snarls in her face, breath likely smelling like old Lunchables and Watermelon Pucker.

“Lucas Kurzenberger!” yells a voice from behind. Three more paper girls roll up on their bikes. “Cool costume, faggot.”

Kurzenberger Krueger isn’t scared of girls! I mean, he’s probably terrified of girls… but he isn’t scared of these girls.

“You heard me, AIDS patient. Get lost.”

Krueger doesn’t fight too hard at this. “Whatever. Good luck getting home alive, bitch.” He flips them all off, and the three costumed hooligans take their leave.

Come on, fellas. Let’s go home and watch Growing Pains.

“You shouldn’t call anyone the F-word. And anybody can get AIDS, not just gays,” Erin protests to the girls who just helped her out.

“You’re welcome,” says the freckled redhead, putting her headphones back on. What do you think she’s listening to on her cassette player? Probably Everything by the Bangles! That just dropped in October!

“Don’t mind Mac,” says the one with the ponytail.
“Yeah, she just knows how to talk to their kind,” says the black girl with the shoulder-length hair, “you know, Herbs.”

Erin does a double-take. Mac? The Mac? MacKenzie? The first paper boy around here who wasn’t a… you know… boy?

Wow!

Mac seems like a tough cookie! A real legend!

The black girl is named Tiffany, she’s also in Catholic school. St. Pete’s where the priests are possibly not as touchy-feely. The ponytail girl is named KJ, she’s at Buttonwood Academy. That’s a Jew school! No little-boy-penis-fondling priests there.

“You rich girls want to compare report cards all night or can we get back to business?” Mac asks with cold impatience. Wow! Fearless! Look at her go!

The three of them met last Halloween, pretty much exactly a year ago. Halloween night gets a little risky, so they’re only going to all ride together for this particular session. “You can totally join us, too, if you want?” offers KJ, but Mac immediately disagrees. She lights up a cigarette. “No, it’ll take too long for all four of us to do the entire development together. We’ll split up into two groups. New kid can ride with me.”

Oh boy! Wow!

Mac “asks” to borrow one of Tiffany’s spiffy new $49.99 Radio Shack whiz-bang 14-channel CB radio walkie-talkies. If Mac breaks it, she’s buying a fucking new one for her. Meet back here at dawn, y’hear?

Smoking is what the bad kids do.

And they split up! A bit apprehensive, Erin tags along with Mac. Smashed pumpkins and creeps in dark clothes dot the neighborhood. Billy Corgan? Can’t rule him out!

Mac has every house on Poplar St., except for the old man in 1833. The fucker won’t pay, so she skips his house every morning. Who cares if he’s still in the subscription book. “Our routes, our rules. I’m sick of shaking down deadbeats. Either pay us on time, or get your stupid sports page somewhere else.”

Erin is in awe of this bold tomboy’s give-no-fucks attitude. “Cool,” she smiles. This Mac kid, breaking the sex barrier and all that with childhood paper delivery. Wow.

“Like it matters. We’re a dying breed anyway,” Mac claims, pulling out another cigarette. Her dad has a feeling that newspapers are on their way out. All the trees are almost dead, everyone’s just gonna get their news from TV. Maybe even the Internet! But they don’t know that yet. Our little secret.

A fucking cop shows up on the street and starts blaring his lights at them. “Coyle! What the hell are you up to?” this fucking cop asks, addressing Mac. “My job?” she replies, unfettered.

This fucking cop says he’s heard multiple reports of vandalism. Window smashing. Would Mac happen to know anything about that? She takes a puff and tells this fucking cop to go screw.

“You address me as officer, young lady. And put out that cigarette before I write you up.”

Erin jumps in and tells this fucking cop that Mac has been with her all night. She can vouch for her. No window smashing at all from us! Just paper-deliverin’. We cool.

This fucking cop gives up, shoots Mac a toothless warning, and gets back in his fucking cop car.

After Erin asks Mac what cigarettes taste like, the walkie-talkie goes off. Tiff and KJ are in trouble on the corner of Locust and Ash! Let’s boogie!

Tiffany and KJ got jumped by three spooky boys in spooky ghost costumes! Tiffany fell off her bike and skinned her knee pretty badly. KJ is fine. But they made off with one of Tiffany’s expensive fancy-pants walkie-talkies. Tiffany cries, laments the loss of her walkie, the one she had to use almost all of last Christmas’ tips to afford! Waaahhh!!

KJ says these freaks were speaking Spanish or something, but Tiffany’s three years of Spanish class proves that it wasn’t Spanish at all. Erin suggests calling the cops. “The same cops who think I’m a criminal?” asks Mac incredulously. Fat chance. Fucking Stony PD pigs. *spit*

Mac warns through the walkie that whoever stole from her friend is dead meat. Look out, nerds…

Don’t fuck with the Babysitter’s Club.

The girls bike up and down the desolate streets looking for the culprits. Eventually, they come across a new construction home with a window half-open.

“We’re not really going to fight these guys, are we?” asks a very apprehensive Erin.
“If Tiff’s stuff is broken, we’re gonna murder them,” responds a very fiesty Mac.

They all climb through the window and recoil from the odor pervading the house. “Smells like month-old barf in here,” says Tiffany. Erin hears the kind of similar hum you’d hear from a muted TV. Perhaps it’s a muted TV! Sounds like the hum is coming from the basement. Shit, basements are scary.

So the girls go downstairs, because why not? There they find a very large oblong…thing…draped in a black sheet. While attempting to pull the sheet off, KJ observes that it feels “kinda like skin”. Oh hell no, son! Fuck that. Tiffany is out of here.

It’s been real, you guys. Nice doing paper routes with you and everything. Hopefully Dukakis wins the election in a week!

Erin observes that it’s neither skin nor a sheet. It seems like a parachute. She uncovers the object and it looks like the orbiter of a space shuttle. The front compartment capsule part. The part that would have a parachute attached. Erin likes space, she dreams about dead astronauts! And since USA uses shuttles these days, perhaps this is from some other country. Like Russia?

Tiff wonders if it’s part of an alien spacecraft ooooooohOHOHOHO spooky!

KJ looks annoyed. “This is the fiftieth anniversary of the War of the Worlds,” she explains to the rest of her dumb friends who clearly don’t read the paper like she does. That one night where Orville Welles read the story on the radio and caused mass panic all over the country. Obviously, someone is trying to scare them. Obviously, someone is trying to bait girls who work for the newspaper into telling some publishers to run a story about aliens. Nothing to see here, show’s over and whatnot!

The hum gets louder. And then there’s a bright flash of X-Ray radiation that makes the skeletons of the four girls visible for a brief moment. Tiff’s flashlight is dead.

“RUN,” she declares. Then they all run, thinking the thing’s gonna go off like a bomb.

Now the speculation starts. Is it a Martian nuclear weapon? Why would Mars want to blow up a basement in Cleveland, Ohio?? And it looks like the power is out all over the neighborhood? This thing just sucked the light out of everything?

The four of them stare up at the star-filled sky. Erin comments that the stars look way too bright to be normal. Even when she’s camping in the boonies these constellations aren’t this visible.

Tiff draws the rest of the girls’ attention to the three figures skulking away across the street. “Guys. It’s them.”

Get those Ovaltine decoder rings out, ladies!

And yeah, they’re speaking another language all right, but it ain’t local. KJ catches up with one of them, but she gets a knuckle sandwich to the grill! Bam! How’d that taste??

Mac is pissed. “Son of a bitch! Hit a girl?! Gonna rip your eyes out of your…” yeesh, then she tears the facial covering off this guy and he looks…

Well, it’s not normal.

This dude, with his crazy triangle pupils and the weird robotic connections on his face, he starts strangling Mac with his hands while yelling the gibberish. He gets thunked on the head by Tiff, who now has the hockey stick that KJ’s been carrying around.

That hum starts up again, which scares the dang bejesus out of these creeps. They run into the woods. Mac is puking off to the side. Things are still very unclear.

But one of the dudes dropped something! It looks like a compact with a logo on it.

An Apple logo.

Final Thoughts

THAT’S IT?! Don’t leave me hanging like this! What’s going on?

Shit, I guess I gotta keep reading.

The final few pages of the comic show full-page spreads of the four main characters, and Mac is wearing a Wax Trax! Records shirt. That is fucking baller, dude.