Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #24! In the previous installment, Erin and the Tiffs find Wari. Mac still won’t kiss KJ. Erin and the Tiffs find out that Erin just came by the other day! KJ threatens a doctor at knifepoint to help Mac cure her cancer.

Ok you’re caught up let’s keep moving go go go this storyline is fucking interesting.

Paper Girls, Issue #24 [September, 2018]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

That’s right, Mac. Breathe in that cancer-killing gas. Ironic that it’s farts, but hey. Modern science.

Wari reminisces. A woman wearing a sabertooth tiger-skin shawl yells at Wari in her cave and tells her to shake a leg. “I’m going home! Wari, get up! You have to see this!”

The woman is Dr. Qanta Braunstein, who looks like she’s been living in the far, far past for long enough that her once mohawked hair is now down to her shoulders. Either the four girls delivered Braunstein’s message, or someone in the far future dug up her distress signal. “Either way, the future threw me a lifeline,” she says, checking out a capsule drifting toward Earth via parachute.

“So. You now leave me?” Wari says, looking weary. And, yes, she’s leaving! She’ll always fondly remember the good old days, but bye!

Wari starts screaming other-language things. Then she calms down and points her toddling son. “Jahpo. My baby. You taking him with.”

Nope! Sorry, sister! Not cool, her people would never allow it, etc. Wari’s suggestion is to go to some other time, then. Just take the kid, please. He deserves better than growing up in smelly 11,706 BCE.

Wari begs. She begs and pleads and sobs and moans and cries. Not really. She’s not that emotional. She just asks VERY NICELY if Braunstein can help keep her child away from his fathers. They must be mean, I guess. 11,706 BCE men are mean? Who would’ve thought??

Braunstein frowns. She doesn’t know how to raise a kid!

Yeah, the trick is to not let them eat styrofoam and the rest kind of falls into place.

Erin is eating what appears to be FUTURE FISHSTICKS while Wari tells her and the Tiffs her story. Braunstein took her and Jahpo to Indonesia “years after her colleagues in the States stopped looking for her”. In return, complete silence. No one was to know where they came from. Braunstein raised Jahpo as her own, and he and Wari were unofficial siblings. Apparently, even Jahpo doesn’t know the truth about that.

When Erin asks her what she meant by “you were just here the other day”, Wari’s eyes go slightly askew and she asks the three of them who the hell they are and why they’re in her house. Alzheimer’s! That’s fun! Double-Oh Tiff is like “look, ma’am, do you have Braunstein’s time travel gizmo or not?”

“Ah, now I remember,” Wari says, pointing at Erin with her dementia-ridden face. “Your name is Erin Tieng. You came her a few months ago to give me something.” Erin is confused and started and… still a little hungry so she keeps eating these fishstick-looking lumps.

Wari asks her Robot Eyeball if it knows where the time travel doohickey is. “I’m sorry, Wari. I am unable to say.”

Well that’s just peachy, ain’t it folks! The one chance to go home and Wari lost the time travel thingamajig in a sock drawer somewhere. “We are never getting home,” Erin frowns solemnly.

Tiff has other thoughts to prioritize over getting back to 1988.

Thanks, Obama.

Both Tiffs are beside themselves about this while Wari looks on bookshelves for the whatever. KJ radios Erin to ask how things are coming along. Meanwhile, KJ’s got her scalpel to the doctor’s throat while Mac lies on something that looks like the Animus from Assassin’s Creed (NERD ALERT!). “This is creepier than my gym teacher testing us for scoliosis. But if it’s gonna zap out my disease, then let her rip.”

Doctor Knifepoint readies the computer program, the Zap Out My Disease program. “After I finish this scan, the Gene-E will eliminate any… Hmm.”

Hmm? What hmm? WHAT hmm? Oh god, there’s a hmm? No hmm!

“This young woman doesn’t have leukemia. She never did, and she never will.”

WHAT? HUH? ERP? SHMORT? The doctor goes on to explain that whoever gave Mac the diagnosis was wrong as shit. She’s actually going to die from 4DC, an untreatable disease! “It’s a rare group of cancers that only afflicts a small percentage of certain professionals… time travelers.”

SHMORT! Doc hits a button that shackles Mac to her Animus. Ain’t no time travelers gonna come invade 2171. He thought they were just immigrants, but he was DEAD FUCKING wrong!

“Step away from there or you’re a dead man!” KJ screams as Doc rummages through a drawer.

“I already am. Do you have any idea what WATCH does to people who help you whores?” He pulls out a device that looks like a COVID-era forehead thermometer. “Killing you is my only shot at living.”

The doctor sprays KJ with a green fart. She coughs and collapses. Doc promises that it’s just a sedative and that he’ll wait until they’re both unconscious before he kills them! Hippocratic oath and doing no harm indeed!

Sorry, girls. Dr. No-Nards is stationed in the maternity wing.

KJ activates her hover boots, which sends the hover vibrations right into Doc’s dick, rendering him quite incapacitated and hopefully neutered like any animal Bob Barker touches. KJ shambles over to open the door while Mac tears herself out of her contraption. “You are seriously my hero,” Mac says. “I seriously need a nap,” KJ replies.

Time to leave. Forget getting rid of cancer, I guess. “The new kid was right, you die when you die. But that ain’t gonna be today.”

Back in Time Travel Cop HQ, the giant floating cyberpunk ship, Cardinal interrupts Jahpo talking to his pet Multi-Eyeball Beast Editrix. A local doctor had a run-in with some juvenile time travelling hooligans at the hospital. “At a hospital? Cardinal, how many calls a day do we get about mentally ill patients who think they’re lost in time?”

This is real, sir! KJ is wearing baggy acid wash jeans! It doesn’t matter anyway, Alister is still scoping out 1988 and it’s probably a good idea to go join him there. “Tell helm to take us into the Folding,” he orders. It sounds risky as shit, transporting an entire airship through a tiny little vagina-sized hole in the sky. “What about just taking a few of the bots?” Cardinal desperately suggests, but they “leave too much of a footprint”.

Bottom line, it has to be done this way. Jahpo snaps at her, he apologizes, and she tells him to rest. “I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

Erin and the Tiffs have started searching for the thingamabob as well. “If you say it’s here, we’ll find it, Wari,” Young Tiff assures.

“Unless she’s speaking nonsense, which she most definitely is,” Double-Oh Tiff mutters.

Seems very unlikely. The Jahpo I know hates New York.

Erin, of course, asks if the man in the photo she picks up is Jahpo. “Nowadays, he goes by ‘Grand Father’. A title my foolish son believes he earned.” It clicks that Erin saw this guy way back in 1988 before they were whisked away to 2016. Mac radios Erin again asking for help. “This chick is surprisingly heavy,” she says and she drags KJ along, her arm on Mac’s shoulder. They’re on the roof of a building…somewhere. Does that help? “I could use a hand getting her wherever you guys are.”

Mac places KJ on the roof, where she sleepily curls up. Mac is to keep her safe up there. She can wait for them, goddamnit.

The Tiffs are going to go find the Mac/KJ Power Team. Erin can keep ravaging Wari’s apartment looking for god knows what. “If anyone can figure out what the heck is going on, it’s you,” Young Tiff tells her friend. Then they hug. It’s really touching. Let’s go now.

“Hey,” Erin turns to Eyeball Caretaker, “are you positive you don’t know where Wari hid whatever it is we’re supposed to be looking for?”

“I’m sorry. I’m unable to say.”

Erin eyeballs the Eyeball suspiciously. When she asks it what her favorite color is, and it responds with “I don’t know”, she realizes that the Eyeball does know something and is programmed to keep it a secret. “Any chance it it works like an ATM?” Erin asks. “Maybe you need to enter some kind of code?”

Wari does have a password: “Dreamwomen”.

The robot opens its iris, much like General Hammond from Stargate SG-1, and reveals a little map.

Erin smiles. A map to home.

Final Thoughts

Yeah buddy! Final storyline back in 1988? OR, more likely, 1945 where they can drop the atomic bomb onto Hiroshima AND Nagasaki. Like a group of numbskulls.

One issue left in this story, and then I’m immediately moving on. Best comic I’ve come across. Thanks, Obama!