Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #3! In the previous installment, Erin’s family has mysteriously disappeared, the sky keeps cracking and humming with eerie violet energy, and Mac’s alcoholic stepmother, Alice, claims that Mac’s dad suddenly disappeared from the bed that morning right in front of her eyes. There appears to be some Rapture shit going on!

Alice puts a gun to her head, Mac tries to stop her. The issue ended with a BANG! But we don’t know what happened yet.

Now we will!

Paper Girls, Issue #3 [December, 2015]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

There’s a couple of costumed teenagers hanging out drinking on the high school football field. Terry, with upper lip peach fuzz, stares up at the ungodly purple vortex raining flying dinosaur creatures. “I am tripping my face off,” says Terry. Gabrielle, dressed like a cat, thinks they look like dragons. Two others, Becky and Tonia, are unaccounted for. Gabs was smoking under the bleachers with them, and they vanished into thin air.

Gabrielle is totally freaking out man, so Terry takes advantage of this opportunity and makes his move! Here’s his move: lunging into her face for an impromptu kiss! Smooth, sir.

She shoves him on his ass. “What is wrong with you? I don’t even like you like that, you psycho!” Sorry, Terry. You’re not getting your dick wet before the end of the world. He gets all bitch-hurt about this, forgetting that the fucking sky is falling. “Is it because you’re still into Chris? ‘Cause Chris is probably dead, like everybody else in the whole damn Stream.”

Terry continues his creepy entitled bullshit, yelling at Gabrielle that he’s been wanting to bone her since freshman year, so she owes him big. Now they’re alone and they can finally do it. So tear off those clothes, Citizen!

Look dude, there’s no time for getting mad-rutty. Hate to break it to you, but there’s a very large, scary man wearing a super-futuristic metal suit riding one of these pterodactyl dragon creatures. He’s holding a large glowing scepter that looks kind of like the Halo Energy Sword, except less copyright-infringy. “Scruddy teenagers,” he growls.

My sentiments exactly, buddy. Put another shrimp on the barbie.

Wasting no time, this new guy joining the party zaps both Gabrielle and Horny Boy with his Halo sword. They turn into pink pillars of dust, slowly blowing away from the top-down in the wind.

Zappy the Pinhead speaks jive into his Star Trek insignia radio, calling these kids “stragglers”. Obviously, it’s this guy’s mission to round up everyone still alive and living and hanging around town and turn them into Kinetic Sand. Halfway through his transmission, he hears a loud BANG in the distance! Oh boy, a gun! Looks like this guy’s going to investigate the source of the sound. Sucks to be whoever is involved with this loud gun bang.

Oh right, it’s the four girls! Whoops! Shouldn’t have made a loud gun bang. Surprise, surprise, though. Neither Mac nor Alice got killed. The gun went off during the struggle.

“Is everyone all right?!” Alice hazily asks.
“We’re fine, ma’am,” responds Erin, who is bleeding badly from the stomach, “Mac’s shot must’ve gone right past us. It’s a miracle.”

That escalated quickly.

Then she collapses into Tiff’s arms. “Holy crap!” Tiff yells, a reaction befitting of a 12-year-old who just watched another 12-year-old get shot. The three still-conscious kids start panicking, but don’t forget! Mac’s a dang Girl Scout! She has about fifty merit badges related to caring for gunshot wounds! She was stationed in Da Nang for about ten months killing Vietnamese people! And that was after the war!

After that, then Alice can drive them to the hospital.

But Tiff notices that Alice disappeared…

Great, another victim of the Rapture! So now what? Carry Erin on their handlebars, rattling her around, giving her whiplash while she bleeds out? Nein! Tiff will drive them. Who cares, right? No one’s on the road anyway. If Maggie on the Simpsons can do it, so can she.

“Good enough,” says Mac, “just don’t forget the gun.”

I, for one, blame this all on George H. W. Bush and/or Tipper Gore! Jimmy Swaggert. *checks notable people in 1988* Ted Bundy.

Tiff doesn’t want to bring the gun. Mac wants to bring the gun. Tiff says guns are bad! Mac says they may need to shoot giant killer dragon monsters.

The voice of reason speaks up.

Quiet, dear, the adults are talking.

Fine. No guns.

Tiff barrels down the road in an ugly station wagon. KJ’s in the front passenger seat. They both have their seatbelts on! That’s good. Mac’s in the backseat with Erin, desperately trying to keep the blood from pouring out. Luckily, Tiff’s mom is a doctor at the local hospital, and if she didn’t get whisked away to space with the rest of the non-sinners, she can help Erin not die. Maybe.

Laughter emanates from the walkie-talkie again. “Ye’s ben twentied, jungs. Renders now or B same-fated as thy friend,” proclaims the Jar Jar Binks asshole through the receiver. The girls are like, great, some new creep to worry about. They wonder what happened to the other creeps. Ol’ Triangle Eyeballs.

The car passes by a newspaper truck, where, speak of the devil, two of them are currently crouched behind! After the car passes, they leap a fence to the backyard where their friend got wasted by one of those pterodactyl dragons. They look like they’re trying to revive him, but he ain’t even got no head no more!

Can you hear me, Johnny?! Speak to me, man!

Meanwhile, Erin is hella hallucinating now. She’s ice skating with President Ronald Reagan! “Snap out of it, Erin. Remember when you spaced in Social Studies last week?”

Soviet rockets fly willy-nilly in the sky above as the two of them skate around the frozen pond. “What…what does this one mean? Are we all dead?” Erin asks, remembering the dream where she was in heaven talking to the Challenger space lady.

She asks why she was shot. “Why is God letting this happen to me?” She doesn’t get a real answer. Erin misses the fifth grade, and Reagan knows why. She had friends back then. No friends now! Not even Wendy, your fake pen pal!

Listen kid, it’s time to buck up. Trust Ronald Reagan, you’re not dead. You’ve got a job to do. “Remember your papers,” he says before pulling an apple out of his coat pocket – black with a bleeding bullet hole through the center.

Then she snaps out of it a little, stirring and moaning in the car. But first, I have an instant classic panel to share:

But, man, Jodie Foster would’ve been really fucking impressed had things turned out differently!

Back in the car, Mac is begging Erin to, like, not die. The walkie-talkie dude keeps threatening these youngins with his flowery prose, and it’s not long before they come up to him standing in the middle of the street looking badass as shit, unafraid of a car coming right for him. Tiff slams the brakes; they stop within inches. He never moved a muscle.

“What is this guy?!” Mac sneers. Tiff is going to try talking to him. Y’all stay in the car, daddy’ll take care of this!

“No-how u lurked solong, but endcredits for de lot, masters. Ur transgresses willn’t B–” proclaims this dude as he maintains his intimidating pose. He sounds like some nerd AOL Shakespeare chatroom. All like “Forsooth, my droogs, a/s/l?”

Tiff interrupts his inanities with pleas to help them stop their new friend from dying. Steel Suit boggles and realizes that these kids are “locals”. I suppose he thought these precious, cherubic children were triangle-pupiled aliens? He shifts his Rosetta Stone translator module back to 1988 English and apologizes for the confusion. “This must have been very troubling for you to witness,” he says before aiming his Halo Sword right at Tiff’s eyeballs. “I promise you won’t remember a thing.”

Hey, you know that gun that no one was going to bring? KJ pulls it out and aims it right at Master Chief over here.

Your word is worth SHIT to us.

Tiff is pissed off, man. “We said we weren’t gonna bring that thing!”
“No, you guys said it…and I’m a crappy listener,” KJ responds, trigger finger gettin’ itchy.

This still-nameless dude from the future, or Mars, or something, assures the kids that everything will be juuuuust fine. Mac isn’t too sure, but she doesn’t seem to be one to take anything an adult says at face value. “Can these people fix Erin?” she asks the guy, who pivots and insists that none of them should be out and about during “the Ablution”.

“If you would please just remain perfectly still, I can take you to–”

BANG!

For the second issue in a row, a gun goes off. But it wasn’t KJ, she promises! She’s just as surprised as everyone else. Nevertheless, a bullet had traveled right through the side of this guy’s bald dome, right above the ears. Like, through the brain. Probably through the optic nerves. Three more had hit him in the chest. He’s dead, Jim.

The perpetrators make their presence known straight-away. Douchebag #1 and Douchebag #2 from the Outer Space Triangle Pupil Eyeball Federation. “What is wrong with you alien dicks?!” yells a rather incredulous Tiff, “This guy was going to help us!”

One of the aforementioned alien dicks grabs the dead dude’s voice-translating coin and informs her that, no, he wouldn’t have helped you. Quite the opposite, actually. What’s the opposite of help? … NO help. He would have no-helped you.

These guys, though! You can trust these guys. They’re not aliens at all! In fact, they’re just like you suburban Ohioan kids!

They’re teenagers!

One of us… One of us…

Final Thoughts

We’ve got people disappearing, futuristic mercenaries trying to eliminate people who haven’t disappeared yet, kids bleeding out from their gunshot wounds, thieving otherworldly teenagers with technology from 2015, and Reagan hallucinations!

With bated breath, I await what more insanity could possibly unfold in the next issue.