Paper Girls, Issue #19

* Part 4 of 5 of the Paper Girls Volume 4 storyline *

Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #19! In the previous installment, Mac, KJ, and Erin escape the wrath of Charlotte Spachefski and make their way to Tiff’s house, where they find her with her future husband. They hide in the basement while Transformers continue battling it out right outside.

We learn that Grand Father’s name is “Jahpo”. He and the Prioress lose the battle when Teenage Mutant Transformer punches their Transformer in the gut, knocking them down to the ground. Prioress gets killed, and since Jahpo obviously loved her, he orders “Last Rites” on every single one of them. I imagine that means “fuck the timeline, kill them all”.

Rootin’ for Jahpo on this one even though I’m not supposed to!

Paper Girls, Issue #19 [January, 2018]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

“Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug, 17 Years Later” -Bloomberg Politics headline, June 15, 2017

What a colossal dingus! That guy should probably never run for president.

Everyone in the Tiff House is ok. A Transformer didn’t fall on them this time, although we can’t rule it out in the very near future.

It has been hinted so far that only Tiff can see these hulking Transformer robots. KJ, Mac, and Erin ran all the way across town without seeing any, so why can Tiff? She looks dejected and claims that she most certainly is not crazy. For now.

“If they’re from the future, maybe these machines have cloaking devices. Like the Klingons in Star Trek IV: The Voyage–”

She gets cut off, thank God. Chris doesn’t care what’s out there, he just wants his wife back. His adult wife. The one that he can legally fuck.

KJ has a big smile. “You marry this guy?!”

“At least it is a guy,” Mac mumbled. KJ has just about had enough and gets right in Mac’s face (not the kissing kind). “The hell is your problem, Mac?”

Yowza!

Break it up, you two lovebirds! It’s time to go find Older Tiff! She’s lost among the robots somewhere and she majored in business! Let’s go find her! Much like Star Trek XXXIII: The Wrath of Cortex.

Meanwhile, Older Tiff checks out a sign at the convenience store front window: “SORRY CLOSED DO TO Y2K”. As you see, she has something to say about that. I obviously couldn’t do Older Tiff’s appearance justice with a wordy description. Consider it a gift.

“Hey! Is somebody in there? Please, I’m just making a beer run. I’ll settle for Zima if you’re out of–”

“Go home!” yells a large-eyeballed guy who suddenly appears at the window. “You need to get out of here, lady! It’s happening again! I… I tried to tell them! The dinosaurs! The dinosaurs are coming back!”

Okay, weirdo. Speaking of coming back, some of these teenage mutants garbed like ninjas and speaking their weird, blocky alien language ambush the store with a various assortment of guns. One aims at Older Tiff and says some gobbeldygook, but another gently pushes the gun out of the way and says something else. I’m guessing “Put the gun down and let’s find a bathroom before I take a large diarrhea dump in my ninja outfit.”

“Wait! Do I know you guys?” Tiff yells, but she doesn’t get an answer. They never get an answer, do they? She thinks she might have dreamed of this moment, but she can’t remember. They never remember, do they? Such is life.

Grand Father’s men have some news to share. After being instructed to speak the good English, Grand Father is informed that they destroyed the “stomper” that killed the Prioress… but it was empty. No one in it. At all. Sorry. These kids must’ve escaped! LOL! So if it’s all the same to you, sir, can we retire back to our houses and cook some Hungry Man TV din–

“They’re not kids, they’re terrorists. Now find them and bring me their goddamn heads.”

GULP!

Meanwhile, Tiff tells the rest of the group that they don’t know what they’re missing while robots are ripping each other apart. Chris asks why these invisible bots might want to destroy Stony Stream, and Tiff answers that there are two different colors of bots. They’re mostly just fighting each other. Erin remembers what Charlotte Spachefski said, that they’re in the middle of a time-travelers’ war. “Yeah, dicks from the future are duking it out with dicks from the further future,” Mac sneers.

Tiff sees a bot “explode”, so to speak. More like one of those weird orb-like blasts that sent them all to 2000. “So maybe these robots didn’t use a time machine to get here,” Erin postulates. “Maybe they are the time machines.” KJ suggests hitching one back to 1988. Mac gets mad.

Pent-up sexual frustration needs an outlet, Mac. Even at your age. KJ is right there…

“This was the worst night to do mushrooms,” Chris says, taking another drag on his cigarette. This is the part where Older Tiff finds the group and then takes a big, long stare at younger Tiff. They both make the same face. Kinda like this: *BZZZORTT!!”

When Older Tiff comments that she looks like her, and that Younger Tiff comments that she is her, Older Tiff suddenly pukes her guts out. Makes for a nice illustration, I’d say. “That’s pretty much how I reacted when all this started going down,” says Mac as the rest of the group projects a real smattering of interesting expressions.

Older Tiff recognizes Mac and remembers that she’s supposed to be dead. Mac’s like “yeah, I know, big whoop, what of it, leave me alone, go screw” and then asks for a cigarette even though one of the Transformers just shot a big missile or something and scared the bejesus out of Older Tiff. At least both Tiffs can see them! That’s what the kids call “a relief”.

Erin suggests laying low in a church for some reason. So that’s where they start to go. Sounds like a flimsy plot-forwarding device to me. “Hey, let’s lay low in a church.” Sounds like they’re going to find something in a church. How very interesting, hmmm?

Awww, everyone’s bonding!

They make it to the church and Erin does that thing with the holy water where you touch it and, hopefully, you don’t burn when you make the sign of the cross. KJ asks if Older Tiff knows anything about what became of her over the years, but it is unknown. Older Tiff read about Mac in the paper, but everyone lost touch after 1988. “These girls are our best friends. How could you just forget about them?” Younger Tiff asks, raising an eyebrow. Honestly, this happened to Old Erin. They all gave her shit for forgetting about the weirdest few days of their lives.

“Look, Mom and Dad made us quit our route just before we turned 13. Shows like America’s Most Wanted did stories about girls our age getting abducted, and suddenly, it seemed stupid to let kids deliver their papers alone.”

A LIKELY STORY! Oh… wait… yes, that is quite likely. Mac thinks that’s a stupid reason to quit a well-paying job. I’d quit my job and become a paper girl if it was well-paying, believe you me.

Out of nowhere, Grand Father’s three-man crew pops into the church. “Ye ave noright 2B n dis era,” one says, brandishing a magic futuristic death wand. Still wearing her super-cool hover boots, KJ propels forward and… gets knocked to the floor. Ha! Oh well!

“Shit!” grits Mac. Chris yells at these guys, but he gets zapped by a wand and disappears to… I’m gonna guess Gary, Indiana. Why not?

These girls are next, but someone shoots them all in the chest with real guns that have real bullets in them!

Spechefski to the rescue!