Paper Girls, Issue #27

* Part 2 of 5 of the Paper Girls Volume 6 storyline *

Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #27! In the previous installment, we get to see more of where the girls are and what they’re going to do.

Erin: 2016, and she needs to moonwalk to get back to 1988.

KJ: 1958, and she’s going to find Charlotte Spachefski.

Mac: ~5,000,000,000, and she’s going to die via cosmic gamma-ray burst with Dr. Qanta Braunstein.

Tiff: 1988 + ~thousands, and Not-Not-Erin is going to help her help them win the war against the Old-Timers, which she already did! Apparently.

So let’s get RIGHT BACK to it, kids.

Paper Girls, Issue #27 [April, 2019]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

“All clear! It’s safe for you to come out now!”

A teenage Charlotte Spachefski has been hiding a Teenage Mutant Time Traveler in her cellar. She wears an awful, tacky poodle skirt. “You’re a lifesaver, Charlotte.”

KJ is hiding in the bushes watching the two of them converse. This is the Jude that Charlotte fell in love with, and let me tell you, he’s quite a piece. He’s got anime hair and an Elvis face. Charlotte asks him to stick around, but he has to go see his friends’ work on their ship. Charlotte begs to see the ship, but then her father calls her from inside the house! Gotta go before she gets a good old-fashioned 1958 caning!

Jude helps young Charlotte through her cellar doors, and KJ pops out of the bushes to threaten him with the underside of her hover boot. “Hey, Jude. Don’t make it bad.”

Jude doesn’t resist. He throws his hands up in the air. “You work for the Old-Timers?” he asks. “Hardly,” she responds. “I’m just a regular old kid trying to get back home to 1988. That’s where I met your buddies Heck and Naldo.”

Ah yes, Heck and Naldo. Good guys. Terrible names. Jude is like, what the fuck were you doing hanging out in 1988 and why the fuck would you want to go back? KJ is like, it doesn’t matter, this all started because you creeps stole Tiff’s walkie-talkie.

Oh yeah, that one. He remembers that one! A nice piece of business. “My guys and I are like one of your old super-gods, Robyne Hude.” He leaps over the fence. “We steal from the greedy past to give to the needy future, dig?”

KJ follows with her hover boots and asks if he can get them to 1988 anyway. She wants to see Mac again! Jude respects her honesty about having a girlfriend. “I was still in the closet at your age,” he says, “and my people actually like our kind.”

Wrong!

There’s more story at the end of the world, by the way. Mac and Dr. Braunstein are traversing the empty, hellish wasteland. It blows. Mac needs a cigarette. Braunstein doesn’t want to give her one. There are no cigarettes at the end of the world. That, and they can’t waste any time getting Mac to the capsule before it’s too late.

Braunstein doesn’t answer, but Mac wonders why she’s not going to come back to the past with her. Why she gotta die with these post-apocalyptic monsters? Braunstein tells her not to call them monsters, but then one huge-ass bug-like monster pops out of the ground! While Braunstein holds its jaws open with her cane, Mac unsuccessfully attempts to shoot the fucker with Braunstein’s zap gun.

Then she turns the safety off and obliterates the thing. Mac gets blown back and lands on her Walkman, breaking it. She had a Prince tape in there! Sign “O” the Times! Could Mac get any cooler? “Huh, my father used to have one much like this,” Braunstein says of the Walkman. It really is too bad she can’t go back in time and stop all of this from happening. The cassette is a good analogy: time is one long spool, stretching from beginning to end. Each segment can only be taped over so many times before it degrades.

God, remember those days? I had about 20 VHS tapes stuffed with recorded Simpsons episodes. My prized possessions!

When Braunstein notes that maybe God wanted it this way, Mac asks how she knows God is real. Braunstein never used to be much of a believer in anything, but as she got older she has come to believe that there must be a higher power out there.

“What kind of asshole creator would let a kid die?” Mac questions, and rightfully so. “You have every right to be pissed, Mac. Nothing about life is fair… but at least yours isn’t over yet.”

“So what? Even if I escape this nightmare, I have what, a few more years left, tops?”

Corny cliche time! It’s not the amount of time you have, it’s what you do with it that counts!

“Anyway, at least your tape survived. Is it a good one?”

“Nah…”

♪ ♫ ♬ Sign o’ the times mess with your mind/Hurry before it’s too late…♪ ♫ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♬

Tiff’s turn. “What the eff is happening right now?”

What the eff indeed. Erin introduces Tiff to her three companions: A 19-year-old Erin duplicate, an older, short-haired KJ duplicate, and a very old Tiff dupl– wait a minute, the real Tiff? How? Whut? Huh? Hurr? Durr? Fuh?

“It’s me, ‘Double-Oh Tiff’! I’m the older version of us you saved from my trainwreck of a life back in 2000!”

Fuh?

Old Tiff proves it by sharing a third-grade memory of them shoplifting Garbage Pail Kids cards and never confessing to anyone. Then they hug. Everyone smiles.

I’m glad these new people are just the old people. I’m not fucking learning any new characters in this stage of the game.

“But, I watched you explode! And… how you die is how you die!” Tiff scrambles and flails. And maybe so, young lass. Maybe so. But maybe not! In fact, “not” is correct! She didn’t die. Her current companions snatched her up and brought her forward in time at the last split-second. That’s cool and awfully convenient. I smell a plot hole, Brian K. Vaughan. Way to not be completely immaculate.

“Tiffany,” the older KJ duplicate faces her seriously, “our foremothers rescued your older self for the same reason they gave birth to us: because you and each of your friends are vitally important to the future.”

So where’s Mac? And they all eyeball each other nervously. “Look, ‘it’s complicated’ is the understatement of the friggin’ mega-annum,” says 19-year-old Erin. “But all you need to know is that these ladies and I are gonna reunite you with all three of your fellow papergirls.”

But they need Tiff’s help to do so! She is vital to the reunion! Here’s why!: Um…

Ah yes, ok, so get in the virtual reality chair. Now.

Back in the day, time-travelers needed to leave coded messages in newspapers. Kinda like what Charlotte Spachefski did. Since the Old-Timers caught on, they now have more sophisticated means of communicating with other eras. Dreams. Dreams are secret messages from the future.

The caveat is that the dream message must come from contemporaries. For some reason! Everyone’s tried and it doesn’t work! Even Old Tiff had a problem. So get in the virtual reality chair. Now.

We also need you to give Don Draper the idea for that famous Coca-Cola commercial. That will also create peace on Earth.

“This is totally bonkers. What makes you guys think any of this is really going to work?” Tiff asks, sizing up the machine in front of her.

“That’s the thing, beautiful,” Old Tiff smiles. “It already has.”

SO GET IN THE CHAIR. NOW!

Next, it’s Erin Time. She looks, and I know this will be a shock to everyone, apprehensive. “The dream told you to moonwalk, right?” she mutters. “I think that means I have to retrace my steps…”

“…back to where this all started.”

She finds herself in front of the foreclosure, where it all started, where they all found that time travel capsule in the basement. Crazy to me that this house is still in the same shoddy shape that it was 28 years ago, but I know people who have been in shoddy shape for 28 years, so I suppose it’s reasonable?

She creeps her way to the basement, knife ready. The silhouettes of girls with Tiff and/or Mac-like hairstyles can be seen from behind. “Um. Hello?” Erin calls out meekly. “Please. I don’t know what you want, but I’m just looking for something my friends and I found down here a few days… I mean, years ago.”

The girls don’t move. They don’t make a sound.

“Quit messing around.” Erin continues creeping down the stairs. “I know this is where I’m supposed to be. I had, like, a… vision.”

She sees that the “girls” are, in fact, mannequins. One looks like someone fucked the mouth and caved it in a little bit!

REMEMBER HOW THE VIOLET TIME TRAVEL NOISE WAS “VURR VURR VURRRR”?? Well, just like on Jahpo’s ship, a yellow Folding appears. His was square, but this one is a perfect triangle. Oh yeah, and it goes “RUV RUV RUUUVVV”.

Erin bolsters herself. This is cake! She’s done this time travel thing before, and look! This one might take her home! “It’s like Mr. T says, ‘You gotta follow your dreams.’ Just follow your…” she reaches a hand close to the terrifying yellow triangle-shaped portal… and her fingers start stretching toward the opening as if it were a black hole.

Then her whole body gets stretched out and forced through the portal. As if it were a black hole.

Only it’s a yellow hole.

“OOHF!” she lands on the other side, and god knows where she is now? Kennedy’s 1961 Lincoln Continental? On the moon kicking Buzz Aldrin’s ass? Columbine High School ca. April 1999?

NOPE! She lands right on Jahpo’s airship. So that’s who came through his Folding. I should’ve guess that! I’m an idiot! *slaps own face repeatedly* Stupid stupid stupid! *punches own jaw until I’m dead*

“Awesome to finally make your acquaintance,” Jahpo tells her while she lies on the floor, pointing his very large gun right at her very small head.

Cardinal looks sadly alarmed.