Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #10! Closing out the second story arc with a bang, or at least a bright violet light. In the previous installment, Not-Erin meets up with the other two Erins and convinces the group, minus Old Erin, to follow her through a portal leading them all to the 701st century. Where they will be “safe”. Perhaps the future will cure Mac’s cancer? Perhaps the future will answer all sorts of unanswered questions?

Or perhaps there will be a completely batshit twist that will cause me to want to immediately move onto the next arc!

Time will tell. 68,000 years of time.

Paper Girls, Issue #10 [October, 2016]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

“What is past is epilogue.“

Three Erins. On the cover. Lookin’ sad and nervous.

I mentioned in Issue #9 that a wormhole opened up over downtown Cleveland and an enormous cyberpunk floating cruise ship emerged. This luxurious Titanic of the Skies contains the Old Man Beard from the end of Issue #5. He was meddling and then the girls time-warped before he could get them.

Well he’s back! With a VENGEANCE! “When are we?” he asks his loyal assistant Whatshername. I forget already. Let me look it up…

…hold on…get yourself some Pizza Rolls while I thumb through my notes… *plays Wordle for five minutes*

…Cardinal. Her name is Cardinal. “Bystand a nano, grandfather… Ograph puts us smackmid of… 002016,” she says after playing Wordle for five minutes. “Ah, the year my mother was born,” replies the old man.

Funny enough, this issue dropped in October of 2016 and the old man makes mention of The Problems that are about to begin after the election! How depressingly clairvoyant.

Same.

Cardinal punches some numbers in her Futuristic Space TI-84 Graphing Calculator and notices ripples in the space-time continuum. Retcons, you might actually say, I suppose. Changings of the past? The old man isn’t worried about that right now. “Curfew has been broken wide, which means our enemy is already here. They must be after the same young girls we are.”

And he only hopes that he and Cardinal find them first… (eek)

Let’s see what those young girls are up to right now! Oh yeah, the portal to the future. Not-Erin, hereby known and referred to as Clone-Erin… never mind, that’s wack. Not-Erin tells them all to shake a leg. Only seconds before the Fifth Folding closes up like so many pierced ears.

“I promise there’s nothing here for you,” Not-Erin says rather bluntly and morosely! Really killing the party here. Damn. “Do you want to live in the future or die in this miserable excuse for a present?” Yeesh, lighten up, Bleak Betty. Take your Xanax.

Mac’s like, FUCK 2016. Unless they cured cancer, she’s taking her chances in the year 9 Billion.

Tiff’s like, SCREW 2016. KJ is still missing and she’s clearly not here. Why not give it a shot?

Old Erin’s like, BOO TO 2016. God knows she’s not happy. But, she’s not about to let some preteens gallivant off to some crazy future with some crazy Erin who’s even crazier than she is! Not on her watch! “Look, none of you are acting rationally. You can’t. You’re twelve.”

Mac doesn’t want to hear it. Did you hear what the old Mexican man said in my childhood home?? She’s gonna get cancer and be dead forever! She says it out loud and breaks down a little bit, so Old Erin takes this last opportunity to sway her against following this weird clone girl.

“Enough. We don’t have time for this,” Not-Erin says with all the emotion of a lawn chair. She starts waving her magic sorceress arms and zaps Old Erin with a beam of violet light.

Hmm. I’ll give you a 9/10 for form, but I’m going to have to dock a few points for not sticking the landing.

The girls are like “whut”. Old Erin may have been some crazy, twitchy nutcase, but she was THEIR crazy, twitchy nutcase, damnit! She lies motionless on the floor.

When asked why she did that, Not-Erin tells them that YOU three paper girls are going to “turn the tide of this war”. “I have come too far and my people have sacrificed too much for some ‘grown-up’ to throw it all away.”

She waves a hand and tells the three of them to shake a leg. Don’t make her hurt you all too if she has too.

Young Erin gets some pep in her step! “YOU BITCH!” she shrieks, leaping at her clone, forgetting all about her propensity for squeaky-clean language. Young Erin starts choking herself, you might say. Really wrapping those fingers around her sociopathic clone’s throat. In the heat of the fracas, she removes Not-Erin’s translation collar. Throwing a punch back at Young Erin’s jaw, she calls her a name that we can only read in her alien language. It’s probably “cunt”, for serious. Young Erin smacks her head on the floor right in front of the portal.

Mac gets hostile, but Not-Erin looks alarmingly angry while shouting her gibberish.

“Tiffany, tabletop her!” yells Young Erin from the floor. Tiff, indeed, tabletops the little shrew. Not-Erin topples over Young Erin and she falls back-first through the Fifth Folding. Bye!

“Whoa,” Tiff stares as the portal closes up behind them, “I…I’ve only had that done to me.”

Old Erin stirs and sits up. Her shoulder is burned up pretty badly, but at least she didn’t get time-ripped apart like that one dude and that one maggot. “Told you that kid was evil,” says Old Erin, finally looking kinda sexy for the first time in five issues.

Ooooooh, I like it when you look angry.

Young Erin is apologetic, as she often is, but it took her this long to really believe that the hockey stick was talking about Not-Erin instead of Old Erin. It wasn’t specific! It just said “other” Erin! It could’ve been any Erin! It could’ve been Erin Brockovich!

There’s that pulsing “VURVURVURVURVURVUR” again, the one that means some inconvenient time-related nutso crap is going to happen to throw everyone for a loop. A time loop. “Oh no, that’s the sound the other bad guys make,” Tiff says, gettin’ all panicky. “The assholes with the pterodactyls? We’re screwed!” Mac says, gettin’ all jittery.

Not today! Old Erin, with her post-puberty faculties in order, has a plan. If KJ was right about not trusting Not-Erin, then she was probably right about the other thing too. The Fourth Folding. We should go to there. And there’s only one person at this point who can really help us!

And it’s not Batman. It’s not even Robin. It’s DEFINITELY not Archie.

The one person who can help them lands her helicopter outside of the abandoned mall. She has a kickass pixie haircut and jumpsuit with a medical pilot patch. She’s Erin’s cooler younger sister who probably gets way more chicks than even I do, yo.

Yeah, and you’re going to gun them into the ground! Use your training! Black Hawk Down!

“MISSY!” yells Old Erin as she hobbles over to her sister with a large piece of gauze over her bloody shoulder. They exchange hugs. Missy starts asking who the EFF these little pipsqueaks are, then Missy recognizes one of them. She gasps. “You’re…you’re my big sister. You’re my big sister and you’re little.” It’s like, having you been keeping up with the Paper Girls comics? Old news.

Missy is confused. Old Erin will explain on the way. Here, have some Xanax to take the edge off. We’re flying the chopper, kiddo.

“We need to take these girls downtown. There might be a way to the get them out of this nightmare,” Old Erin flails frantically at her little sister, who has a big sister and a little big sister right now and it’s a lot to take in at the moment. “Them? What about us?” asks Missy.

In downtown Cleveland, people are running for their lives as a guy on a pterodactyl zaps them all with his Halo energy sword. We find out what happens when one of these hapless victims gets some zappage, because it happens to the girl who sort of looks like Tiff, the first person Not-Erin talked to after she phased into 2016. They don’t die. They get transported to the Old Beard Man’s tube where they remain in stasis until oblivion! Or whatever!

The view from these future mercenaries from their lavish blimp-powered cruise ship is quite a sight! Why, helicopters are putting on a show right outside the windows! “Sir, multi locals b gawking,” Cardinal reports as she gets outfitted with more knightly armor.

“Forget the choppers, Cardinal,” the old man dismisses his second-in-command, “I want your troops to concentrate on transferring every school-age female here for processing.”

Oh ho ho, the plot thickens! Like a fine gravy! It’s a SEX SLAVE RECRUITMENT INITIATIVE! Or, barring that, a SEX SLAVE HEALTH SPA! Or whatever, let’s just keep reading.

Yeah, I dunno. I guess so. The entire ‘80s could give it a run for its money.

All the ladies are crammed into Missy’s helicopter looking for the Fourth Folding as they edge closer to downtown Cleveland. A comedian with nerd glasses once told me that Cleveland rocks, but I never believed him. Old Erin is plugged into her Apple Brain Drain and relaying directions from the passenger seat, while Missy is like “what the fuck am I even supposed to be looking for? Is it going to look like a big gaping vagina?” Ha, no she doesn’t say that, but they’re all damn well thinking it.

When asked how confident she is that this is all going to work out, Old Erin says that this gadget “has been right about all these Narnia portals so far.” And by the way, her time with it is done. She proffers the device back to her young self, from whence it came. “You might need it wherever you end up next,” she says, implying that there’s no way in hell she’s following these kids to whatever death trap they’re going to be stumbling into next.

Old Erin makes up some flimsy excuse about needing to stay in her time to help anyone else in need who comes across her path. She and Missy both. Young Erin accepts this because she’s a dumb 12-year-old.

Yo, I think Frank Lapidus found the Island.

Old Erin advises Young Erin to stay friends with these girls. They all obviously care about each other, even if it’s only been about two days. Old Erin doesn’t know what happened 28 years ago, but she wishes she had gotten to know ANY girl as badass as these too. Maybe she wouldn’t have grown up to be such a dork. OH WELL! Hey check it out, a rift in the sky!

Great! Perfect! Let’s get closer and you kids can just hop out! Be careful not get decapitated by the rotor blades and–

“JUMP?!” shrieks a startled Mac, like she just caught cancer or something, “What makes you think we won’t fall to our deaths on the other side?” The answer? Uhhhh, quit being such a pussy! That’s what makes me think.

Young Erin, ever the voice of reason, says that KJ wouldn’t steer any of the wrong. Ergo, let’s jump through the portal that’s 1,000 feet about the ground. Capital idea!

Tiff glances out the window and notices a whole horde of Editrixes rolling into town. That’s those green orbs with the robot eyeballs. They fought one in the sewers, but Young Erin wouldn’t remember that since she was feverish with bullet-wound-itis at the time.

“What are they?” asks Old Erin.
“Hell if I know,” says Tiff as she works on opening the helicopter’s door, “but I’m never letting one touch me again.” Faithful readers may remember Tiff’s life flashing before her eyes, and it contained a hell of a lot of Arkanoid.

The door is open. The helicopter hovers directly over the Fourth Folding. All they have to do is jump down. Looks fun. Fun like a hemorrhoid.

Why not?? Oh, right, because they’re jumping out of a helicopter without a parachute into a mysterious portal hundreds of feet above the ground. I forgot for a second.

Time to jump, kids! Screw the consequences! The three of them hold hands and gaze upon the portal, sick to their stomachs no doubt. Old Erin breathes a quiet prayer in the front seat. The Editrix orb buttheads start wrapping their distended metal alien eyes around every part of the helicopter: the rotor blades, the cabin, the stabilizer. All this will likely cause a certain death for the older Tieng sisters, but this isn’t their story anymore. The three young girls take their leaps of faith.

They appear mere feet above a peaceful meadow, landing softly in the grass. Softly enough, at least. No broken bones or sprained ankles or shattered pelvises or severed vertebrae. We’re good.

Well, not quite. Mac and Erin landed. Tiff isn’t near them. Tiff doesn’t seem to be present.

“YOU GUYS!” yells the childish, 12-year-old voice of a hockey stick wielder, “YOU MADE IT!”

Sure enough, KJ, whom we haven’t seen one panel of since the previous storyline, appears to be completely safe and sound here in…wherever this is! We don’t know yet.

They share a nice reunion hug! Ha ha! Too bad it’s not a real reunion!

Oh wait, Tiff landed in the river. Whew! She emerges soaking wet and coughing. “Well. That sucked,” she pouts. Ahahaha! Oh you.

Erin isn’t celebrating just yet. “KJ, where are we?”
“I was hoping you knew,” KJ replies, “I landed here a few hours ago. I’ve been looking all over for any sign of you three. Of anyone. Well, that’s a bummer. They landed in a time where all humans have been wiped off the face of the Earth! That sounds splendid. Maybe they’ll stumble upon bomb shelters containing cans of beans.

This is sort of unsettling. Also, what about the hockey stick that you carved messages into, KJ? Didn’t you do that for us? And KJ doesn’t know what the FUCK this kid is talking about at all! Hahaha! It’s good to be all together again!

The scene pans out. The four of them are atop a very large, grassy hill. The hill has a…

…well, see for yourself…

All hail the Apple Inc. Goat Demon! All hail the goat boy!

Final Thoughts

Good place to end for now! 2016 is wrapped up, the four kids have all reunited, the older versions of Erin and her sister are likely dead, but that seems to be the name of the game. The people who help Erin die doing so.

Apples are everywhere! Erin dreams of apples. Apple logos are on all sorts of devices, buildings, and landscaping. The old man wore an Apple Records shirt once.

Look to the apple. Before the apple looks to you.

Or something. I don’t know how to end this.