Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #12! In the previous installment, the girls try to figure out where in time they might be. It’s either very far in the past, or very far in the future. Hard to tell.

Mac encounters a wild woman near a river who attempts to sort of try to kill her with a bow and arrow. A very large beast emerges from the woods and knocks Mac into the river. KJ jumps in to try and save her.

The issue ends with a futuristic woman, Dr. Qanta Braunstein, who time traveled successfully to her destination: 11,706 BCE! And she’ll be meeting up with the girls before you can say boo.

BOO! Did I scare you?

Sorry.

Paper Girls, Issue #12 [March, 2017]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

The cover shows Mac is dead. She died of river cancer.

Wild Woman was able to extract her arrow from the tree that it had been wedged within. “JAN CHARA!” she shouts while pulling back her bowstring. I think I had a neighbor named Jan Chara once.

She lets the arrow loose and it plunges right into the very large beast with a simple “fwick”. The beast collapses immediately to the ground.

What an ordeal. ♪♫ Let’s go get some ice cream! ♫♪♫

Oh wait, not yet. Wild Woman slowly says some Wild Woman Words before her eyes roll back in her head and she starts to collapse herself. “Grab her kid!” Tiff shouts as the woman keels over.

Tiff is able to catch the woman before she hits the ground, and that’s rather impressive considering Tiff is a 12-year-old Arkanoid player and this Wild Woman is some jungle lady who probably has heavy muscles and, oh yeah, also a baby.

Speaking of the baby, Erin grabs the baby as requested while the woman continues being dead weight in Tiff’s arms. “It’s ok, little guy,” Erin says calmly as the kid screeches in her hands.

I believe the technical term for that is “the vapors”.

Tiff asks what happened, but after Erin gives her a very Erin-like answer to that question, Tiff goes “Whatever. We have to go after Mac and KJ.” The river could’ve already taken them to Lake Erie by now! THROUGH CLEVELAND! Gross!

Hold your horses, Tiffany! They can’t just leave Baby and Baby-Mama here to be eaten by another Bigfoot Yeti creature! “Well, I’d ask if they want to tag along, but I don’t exactly speak cavewoman, do you?”

Tiff with the sarcasm! Zip zip zing! On fire today! Do not underestimate Erin Tieng. She may be meek and weird and destined to a future of antidepressants, but she knows how to steal one of those translator collars from her future self if she needs to! And she needed to! And she did! And here it is! And they should use it! “As soon as it came off, that clone girl started talking a completely different language.”

Aha! Yes yes yes. So if we put the choker on the baby, we’ll hear “waaahh, I’m hungry, I need some titties”. But that won’t be helpful! So let’s put it on the Wild Woman. She might say the same thing! But at least she’ll also eventually say some other things.

After exchanging some Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references about the Babel fish, Erin sighs and wishes she actually did have a guide to the galaxy. It would really help them right now. I disagree. It would just tell them that they’re on Earth. Done. Unhelpful.

“And I sure as shit didn’t bring a towel.”

Very good. Well done.

I wanna see what the River Girls are up to. KJ comes to the surface with a limp, assuredly waterlogged Mac, whom she drags to the riverbank. “Please don’t be dead,” she pleads to the girl who’s going to die anyway, so what’s the point? We’re all gonna die someday, slipping into blissful oblivion until the end of time and then some.

Uplifting! Here’s what else is uplifting: Mac, being lifted up by KJ. Then down again, because it’s mouth-to-mouth resuscitation time.

Mac doesn’t take well to it.

I, too, wish there was less perversion in CPR. My workplace is just lousy with CPR training sex offenders!

Mac coughs. KJ is taken aback. “Excuse me for saving your life,” she mutters, annoyed. “Nobody asked you to, dipstick,” Mac continues coughing, “Unlike me, you’ve probably still got a nice long life to live.

Mac’s last cigarette has been ruined. Now there’s a tragedy.

The news of Mac’s inevitable cancer was something KJ wasn’t around to hear about in the first place, but Tiff filled her in on it. “Just because the Ghost of Christmas Future shows you something doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll come true right?” she asks, leaning down to help Mac up from the ground. Mac doesn’t allow KJ to do this either. “Great, now the Jewish kid is gonna lecture me about Christmas.”

OK, now we’re gettin’ pissed! “You’re a total asshole, Mac.”

Uh huh, we all knew that already! Where’ve you been, KJ? Living under a rock? Living thousands of years in the past? Dimwit.

Silence is broken! HARROOOOO! The noise is coming from inside the forest. Based on the noise… yes… it must be Richard Nixon’s head! Arrroooo!!

Mac grabs onto KJ, scared. The noise goes away. Complete silence. Scared hugging continues.

Morning comes. Tiff and Erin have Wild Woman sleeping with head resting on a Cleveland Preserver newspaper bag (just in case you forgot that these four are paper girls, after all!).

The Wild Woman wakes up and looks around. Newspaper bag. Erin holding her baby. Two girls wearing weird clothes from thousands of years in the future. All this is already weird and terrifying.

“What the holy fuck?!” the woman exclaims. The collar works!

I wish I had my own swear collar. I’d say some of the rudest cusses!

“Don’t kill my baby! We only came to this place because I… I thought it’s what you dream women wanted!”

Ha! OK, now we’re cooking with gas! …well, not yet. What’s this now? Dream women? The only Dream Woman I know is Audrey Tautou as Amélie! And neither of these two fit the bill!

“Kid, no one is going to hurt your… kid,” Tiff tells her as reassuringly as she can muster. I forgot the Wild Woman is supposed to be a Wild Child. They thought she might not be much older than them.

“You mean… you people aren’t from the stony stream?”
“Wait, Stony Stream?” Erin asks, surprised and confused, “That’s what you call this place?”
“That’s what the women who bother me in my sleep call it,” Wild Child responds, taking her baby back. She goes on about women talking to her once she became pregnant and how she had to follow a fallen star to the clearing in the forest. “They said if I wanted my boy to live, I had to receive their lost treasure from the three men.”

Great, now the Wild Child is gonna lecture them about Christmas. And, I– whuzzat? Yeah, that sounds awfully familiar, right? Jesus? In the year 11,706 BC? You do know what “BC” stands for, correct? Jesus didn’t live to be 11,739 years old! I mean, I don’t know, maybe he did. He WAS, like, a really hot wizard.

Tiff recognizes this right away as well. Fuckin’ Jesus, man. Erin is skeptical, but Tiff has to admit that it’s pretty close. Except for, again, the being nearly 12,000 years ahead of schedule part of it. “I mean, a pregnant woman follows a star to get gifts from three wise men?”

Moe, Larry, and Curly? Ted Danson, Tom Selleck, and Steve Guttenburg?

“The three men are not wise,” Wild Child says with utter contempt in her voice. She calls them murderers! Savages! Republicans! Awful, awful men, these three. Just the worst God has to offer. They used to be part of her guild, but then they did some unspeakable things. Like vote for Mike Huckabee! Now they “dwell downstream”. Like salmon.

Oh snap! Those two friends of theirs whom they just met two days ago are downstream right now! KJ is trying to kiss Mac there! Oh dear god no!

Wild Child offers her condolences. Their friends are probably dead and she’s sorry! Definitely dead. Ripped apart by three unwise men.

Hey, remember futuristic Dr. Qanta Braunstein? She’s chilling in the woods right now, literally. It’s cold. She wants to add an entry to the Captain’s Log, Stardate 8675309. This message is for her sister: the air is beautiful here in A Lot of Years in the Past. So crisp and clean, bereft of toxins and carbon emissions and smog and Elon’s musk.

Her sister is named Shusha. Qanta mentions in her audio blog that she’s experiencing a sense of déjà vu. You know, that feeling you get when you’ve definitely been in the Land of the Lost.

Oh yeah, Chuck E. Cheese. It doesn’t get any more crisp, clean, and fresh than that. The ball pit is not at all filled with the urine of 1,000 children.

Qanta remembers a split second in the Mouse Restaurant where “the concept of time as a line suddenly felt very real”. It was a moment of existential crisis. She felt very insignificant. And now, finding herself smack dab in the middle of people-are-barely-even-people times, Qanta feels even less significant. No one is important. Everything is irrelevant. People are going to go extinct someday. We are no more special than any other biological entity that will also go extinct some day. The heat death of the universe is inevitable. Entropy is always increasing.

Sorry, almost all of that is a projection of my own existential crisis.

Qanta finds some poop on the ground and then investigates the poop. It definitely looks like poop. Definitely not from a wolf. That’s as far as her investigation takes her. Kinda looks like a human turd, actually.

Crazy stuff, though. There’s not supposed to be anybody here. Her computer machine tracker simulation device console told her that the place is supposed to be deserted! Bereft of men and women and children and Elon’s musk!

“…a software update is required.”

Oh please, that doesn’t help at all. Are you telling me that nothing is functioning properly? Fuck, man, here: hits the big, red software update button

Well, that didn’t work. Now what? Qanta starts panicking, but I’m not exactly sure why yet. Perhaps she hates people AND the poop that goes along with them? It’s entirely possible that she has had a really awful experience when it comes to people and poop. Chuck E. Cheese comes to mind again…

Man, shunking arrows? This is just not my day.

An arrow narrowly misses the Mohawked One. “SHENTOG!” yells a large caveman, running toward her. He’s covered in mud. He has a big square painted on his chest. He certainly doesn’t look like he can even hold a bow, let alone shoot an arrow with it in any competent manner without accidentally gouging out his own eyeball and impaling his brain. So let’s see if he does just that…

…rats, no such luck. I guess Qanta’s going to to have to blast the motherfucker with her Star Trek phaser. So let’s see if she does just that…

…cool, it worked, but now Qanta regrets doing what looks, incriminatingly, like a murder here in the year 11,000,700,000,000 BCE. A couple of fellow “SHENTOG!” cavemen come out of the woodwork (“woodwork” here means “the woods”) and clubs her in the back of the head. One has an upside-down triangle painted on his chest. One of them takes her phaser and her helmet and starts playing Space Marine; he has a power symbol painted on his chest.

Some more Apple-related shenanigans, I see.

Meanwhile, the Not-Dead KJ and Mac are chilling on a beach downriver. Most of their clothes are hanging to dry on a nearby branch. KJ kicks the sand in a frustrated, rather undignified manner. “I don’t think they’re coming for us.”

Mac isn’t expecting anyone to come for anybody. In fact, SCREW Erin and Tiff. She wants to go look for that red shooting star. Or at least what looked like a red shooting star. Mac calls it a “comet-thing”. It was most certainly Dr. Qanta McNulty “Jeff” Braunstein’s capsule descension. Or whatever the real opposite of “ascension” is. Someone look that up for me, I don’t have Ask Jeeves on my computer!

KJ absolutely, positively does NOT want to investigate the possible crazy time machine with some possibly crazy and/or homicidal futuristic boogeyman within.

This is a completely inopportune moment, but Mac notices that KJ is bleeding down her leg, signaling a moon’s blood given rise to her bountiful womanhood. Good luck with that right now, getting your first period a million years in the past. They made tampons out of cattails back then, but don’t take my word for it. I don’t have AltaVista on my computer.

It’s less of a period and more of an exclamation point! Hahahaha! C’mon KJ, isn’t that funny??

Of course, Mac interprets it as something else because these kids are 12 years old. “Did you cut yourself rescuing me,” she yells, alarmed, like a wide-eyed, innocent Dennis the Menace, “It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

Just shut the fuck up, Mac. Seriously. And now Mac is panicking because periods are not only gross, but, like, come on.

“Oh shit,” Mac says, turning away.

“I mean, congratulations?”

Awkward.

Final Thoughts

Looking forward to almost everything going on here! The pursuits of Dr. Qanta Fitzsimmons “Roy” Braunstein! The further bonding of Erin, Tiff, and the Wild Child from hella in the past!

Not so much the period blood.