Yo, if you’re the kind of person who likes the United States of America for some reason that I cannot fathom, then Happy Independence Day… I guess.

ANYWAY, with that completely out of the way, welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #6! In the previous installment, and technically the end of the first “storyline”, Erin and the teenage mutants travel back to the present. The bugs fixed Erin’s horrible bullet wound, but the two mutants kind of morphed into each other during the time travel and are now dead.

In the abandoned house, Mr. Hipster T-Shirt and Beard tries to goad the girls out to the lawn, but the time-traveling pod slowly hums and glows, eventually turning the whole house into one big DeLorean! And by that I mean, it goes back to the future, Marty!

How do they know it’s the future? They immediately encountered an adult version of Erin! And that’s where we left off!

Also KJ is missing, but I’m sure we’ll find her eventually. I ain’t worried. She can take care of herself.

Paper Girls, Issue #6 [June, 2016]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

Erin’s got herself a desk job, per the cover art. Looks like my own cubicle, all messy and disgusting and roach-infested and slathered in toxic waste and covered in hundreds of Clif Bar wrappers.

“Welcome back to ‘Coast to Coast AM’ on this first day of June, 2016,” blares the car radio. That means this takes place in the immediate present! Well, not exactly. Not July 4th, 2022! Happy birthday, America, you giant trash fire. “Present” as in when this issue was dropped, five months before over 62 million really stupid people in the United States voted for quite literally the stupidest man alive today. But hey, whatever, we’ll all be dead some day! Not gonna matter.

That would make Erin roughly 40 years old. The talk-radio station is discussing Native American Mound Builders and extraterrestrials and other paranormal nonsense indicative of Art Bell’s famous conspiracy theory radio show. He starts introducing his special guest, a bestselling author of ebooks involving, among other colorful subjects, “pre-Columbian tribes who constructed elaborate geometric earthworks” when Erin’s phone starts buzzing. Erin fumbles with her earbuds and plugs into the dashboard.

“Is mom insane?” asks the caller.
“Obviously. Why, what did she do now?” asks Erin. Apparently, Erin’s sister received a text from her mother that was just an emoji of an anchor. Sometimes my own mother does things like that! So yes, insane.

“She’s not going to be around much longer, so just let her be old and weird,” Erin advises rather impatiently. It’s 4:40am, which might be the time Erin was awake at the very beginning of Issue #1 getting ready for her paper route. I don’t remember! She does confirm she’s 40 years old though.

Long story short, Old Erin comes across Mac, Tiff, and a Young Erin in the middle of the street, gets out of her car, and everyone goes BBUUUHHHH?? And this is exactly where we left off.

Great Scott!! Ronald Reagan?? The ACTOR??

It seems Old Erin has no recollection of her past self visiting her future self or else she would be like “oh yeah, this…how could I fucking forget?”. She’s quite confused actually. Mac is too, but in an angry way!

“Could you please tell us when the hell this is?” Mac demands.
“It’s…it’s twenty-sixteen,” replies a rather tired Old Erin.
“What is that, military time? We’re trying to figure out what year we just got zapped to.”

Tiff gets it. 2016. 21st century. Flying cars, hover skateboards, Biff Tannen’s eldery almanac-stealing ass.

Old Erin tries to get Young Erin to prove she’s actually her:

“What’s your social security number?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where does your little sister keep her First Communion money?”
“Behind the Encyclopedia Britannicas.”
“What was your secret name for your first goldfish?”
“Who, Mister Percy?”

I always assumed I was pranked one night with a tattoo of the Kurt Vonnegut butthole while I was passed out.

Tears are welling up in Old Erin’s eyes. Tears of disbelief, perhaps? Or maybe because it’s super hella early in the morning and all this is super hella taxing! “Lift up your shirt,” Old Erin says, and Young Erin interprets that for a split second as an older woman trying to get a preteen girl to flash her some titties in public. Old Erin quickly covers herself: “Your stomach. Do you have a scar?”

And the shirts are lifted up, revealing two identical asterisk-shaped bullet-wound scars.

“I have wanted to know where this came from for almost thirty years,” Old Erin says, looking down vaguely at her own abdominal disfiguration. Young Erin can’t believe that. How the hell does one forget they were shot?

Mac and Tiff are getting antsy! KJ is out there somewhere being subjected to god only knows what kind of futuristic torture. Playing Pokemon Go? Listening to Kendrick Lamar? The horror!

Old Erin doesn’t know who KJ is. “Who is she talking about?” she whispers to Young Erin after Tiff insists that they have to find her. Young Erin asks her why she doesn’t remember. Old Erin wipes away tears and simply states that it was a lifetime ago. Sounds like amnesia brought upon by too much late-night screentime and/or excessive Obama drone strikes to the head!

Mac is all “fuck this shit” and starts storming away. Finally, Old Erin wakes up a little bit. “Wait! Jesus Christ, you can’t just be out here!” she hollers frantically. Great, what’s going on here? Some dystopian future where Vladimir Putin is invading Cleveland, Ohio?

Well, we don’t get an answer to that just yet. Old Erin demands that they all stay at her place for now while it’s safe. For all they know, their friend KJ time-traveled to a point way before the rest arrived, and she already fucked off somewhere else long ago! So let’s get cracking! She’s got Netflix, an Xbox One, and 100 flavors of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. You guys are gonna never want to return to 1988 again.

Young Erin is covered in about a gallon of flop sweat. Something tells her that she shouldn’t trust herself, but if she can’t trust herself, then who can she trust? Herself? Maybe? Herself? Hardly! It’s a tough predicament.

Anyway, that might be important. The fact that Erin doesn’t trust herself. I mean, it’s all important I suppose. Don’t mind me, I’m having a stroke again.

Back in 1988, Cardinal asks the old man, and I quote, “Dafug jus pass, Grand Father?”

Something about a “folding” and “bending the cube” and some other rad skateboard tricks just happened.

This isn’t the time to throw out social media buzzwords, pops.

The good thing is, even if these girls could be anywhen (so to speak), the force of this particular…timewarp…ensures that each one has to be specifically in this spot. So that means that KJ is definitely not in 2016. Or at least not on the same day as the other three.

“If any of us were to break curfew now, it would only make this mess more impossible to undo,” says the old man after Cardinal suggests putting a shrimp on the barbie or gettin’ a heid full o’ mad dug’s shite, or whatever, finding the girls now. They can’t find the girls now. Now, the girls have to find their way back on their own. And quick. Or else “home” won’t be here anymore if/when they get back.

So good luck with that, ye wee bairns.

Meanwhile, in the same exact spot 28 years later, the three accounted-for girls tell their full story to Old Erin. She doesn’t remember a lick of it, AND she looks concerned that she doesn’t remember it! Perhaps someone wiped her memory. “Maybe the guys who invaded my year had some kind of…amnesia ray or something?” hypothesizes Young Erin, who read one too many AMNESIA RAY science fiction books!

If you think Smart cars are dumb, wait ‘til you get a load of this: some cars you have to plug in overnight.

Old Erin’s a little jumpy and tense, but don’t worry. Her house is just up the street! No leaving town ever for this lady, no sir. Born and raised and continuing to live in Stony Stream, Ohio! How’s that for sad as shit, ladies? Please, hold your applause.

They arrive at her charmingly small Craftsman-style house. The girls are free to help themselves to, like…water. By the way, Old Erin still works for the newspaper too! Isn’t that silly and heartbreaking?

Old Erin starts getting into more detail about her desk job at the newspaper, but then she gets neurotic and starts worrying about saying too much. “Fuck, I can’t be talking about any of this. If you know about your own future, couldn’t it, like, fuck with the space-time continuum?” she starts grabbing her head and wigging out. Young Erin is getting a hard dose of reality here, and it’s looking bleak.

Mac tells Old Erin to calm down.

“You don’t get to tell me to calm down! None of this is normal, all right!

Tiff interrupts, for something vastly more important has just been brought to her attention:

The cars got smaller and the TVs got bigger? What a future!

Old Erin looks so very tired. Mac and Erin are fucking floored, man. “How do we ever afford this? Do we win the lottery?” Erin asks as eagerly as she can muster at the moment, which is not very. Tiff fumbles with the remote control, which has a trillion buttons, and the TV turns on to the middle of a commercial for, I’m guessing based on the year, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows! Tiff, Mac, and Erin’s eyes couldn’t get any bigger. They’d fall out of their sockets, they would!

“How…how is this real?” Tiff asks. Old Erin looks bored and annoyed as shit.

The commercial is over. The news is back on. “This just in from our social media department, an extraordinary Vine posted by Twitter user @JoanyFootball2.”

“What language is this?” Mac asks, making a big frowny face at the giant future television.

The Vine, as it were, which is ironically outdated, shows crazy lightning storms in downtown Cleveland. The kind of crazy lightning storms that were happening in 1988 Stony Stream before the dinosaurs and the motherfucking cockney soldiers started showing up!

The girls ask Old Erin to take them downtown immediately. “I’m not taking a bunch of children to look for some Time Tunnel that a-a-a fucking T-Rex might fall out of!” Old Erin gibbers and flails. Young Erin asks her not to swear so much. “It, um, just sounds like we’re trying to be cool,” she says passively.

Old Erin is an anxious mess and Young Erin is politely tired of her shit. She tells her if she’s not going to help them, then at least don’t stand in their way while they help themselves. Old Erin thinks about it.

Meanwhile, a gibberish-speaking individual clad in a red rubber suit and a gas mask, possibly for sexual reasons, lands in the middle of an office building parking lot. A regular non-gibberish-speaking man clad in a raincoat notices, but Mr. Bondage Alien quickly rips the guy in half with a time-warp swirlie using magic hand-waving genie powers.

The individual removes their helmet.

Translation: Hey, this doesn’t look like Planet Zebes!

Well that’s unexpected. It sure looks like Erin! Seems like she’s got a mean streak in her after all.

Anyway, back at the Casa de Old Erin, she agrees to help but she doesn’t want to give them a ride in her stupid little car. “We need information first,” she also says, which sounds like such a boring grownup thing to say, for serious.

The power goes out, which still happens in 2016 if you can believe it. The power went out the first time all hell broke loose. “Right before everything went apeshit. Power went out for the whole Stream,” Mac says, closing her eyes, bracing herself…

Old Erin checks her iPhone, which still has a signal. Before she has a chance to explain what an iPhone even is, Tiff recognizes the Apple symbol from the device Erin found earlier! She still has it in her pocket, the little square, screenless iPod Shuffle thing…except even Old Erin doesn’t recognize it. “I could probably retire if I sold that to Gizmodo,” she says, examining the thing. It must be something from even further in the future! Like an Apple Vibrator that also plays sexy music while it vibrates.

Old Erin touches it, and a voice that only she can hear asks her if she wants to connect her existing user ID to the device.

“And?” Mac asks, intrigued, “Do you?”

Old Erin smiles.

“Fuck yeah.”

Final Thoughts

“Fuck yeah” is right! Get that vibrator a-hummin’!