Paper Girls

Paper Girls

This is the first issue of Paper Girls, a serialized graphic novel written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, and colored by Matt Wilson. The series (which ran for 30 Issues from 2015 to 2019) follows a group of teen newspaper delivery girls from 1988 as they navigate an intergenerational war.

As of 2019, the series was diffused in many ways. First, over 4 years Image Comics released each issue as a 130 (approx.) paperback with glossy pages for $9.99. Since the series’ completion, bound (hardcover) copies with multiple issues available. Due to the price of the physical comics and the lack of easy-to-find PDFs online, the audience is somewhat limited by socio-economic constraints. Still, the internet has given Paper Girls life outside physical issues. The series has many active Reddit threads and has inspired much fan art (often in the forms of more comics or in animated). Also, Amazon Studios is also developing the series into a TV show.
The series itself contains many allusions to political tensions and tensions of the 1980s that comment on our current world. This issue includes both a subtle Reagan-Bush campaign sign and a plot that explores both the potential usefulness and dangers of guns. Further, the series both follows and critiques different tropes of the graphic novel genre’s canon. To an extent, the powerful group of girls mimics the crime-fighting units found in places like DC Comics’ The Justice League, but the focus on the power of girls (especially in the issue’s early context of somewhat sexist bullies) bucks against the common notion that comic books are a boys’ pastime. Also, as a review in ImagineFx explains, one of the alien races speaks a dialect that is a mix of Shakesperean-influenced grammar structures and diction and Nadsat, a fictional dialect from Burgess’ 1962 Clockwork Orange. The same review also explains Chiang’s and Wilson’s homages to various movies from the 1980s and how their bright, contrasting colors and clear lines envoke scenes from moves like ET and Flight of the Navigator.
Overall, Paper Girls not only is an artful graphic novel, but a brilliant cultural relic that reveals much about how the world in 2019 is interpreted through a variety of mediums and with a complete analysis we can begin to see how the worlds of film, comics, literature, history, and digital media interact to inform the 2019 reader.

Brian K Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, Jared K Fletcher

2016

"Transcription": The first page

Visual:
Three panels at top of screen. No text but three permutations of an image. If lead left to right then first is black, second is partially shaded, third is clear. They do not fully touch, instead only occupying space next to each other against a larger background. There are two pale hands. holding an apple. The apple is bright red in the final image (and shaded in pink in the second) and in the third image it has a little shine mark on the left. In the second from left image the hands are blue and in the third they are light tan, but the background is blue (the same shade as the hands in the second). Further, the only fingers we see in full are the thumbs of the hands on top. The larger back ground takes up the whole page. A young girl with bangs sits on a foreign looking planet. The ground is blue and as the image goes to the background it gets grayer and darker. She clutches a bright red apple and wears what looks like a one piece swim suit. Her eyes are cast down, likely looking at the apple but the picture only shows her eyelids. In the background are large rock-like structures on this planet and a spherical planet that resembles earth. The girl, the land, and the earth are blue tinted. The sky is made of differing shades of purple , swirling pinkish bits contrast the brilliant violent backdrop. There are also white blotches and stars. On the bottom of the page is a horizontal panel (again it is on top of the larger image and not taking up the whole page) where we close up on the girls face against a purple to pink gradient background. Her eyebrows are angular, casting a shadow above her eyelids. Her head is cut off right above her eyebrows and we see just the top of the apple and it's stem. Her hair is curly and she is still tinted blue (ie: the color is consistent).

Text: In the panel on the bottom
The girl [Erin, we presume] asks "Is this ...?"
an out of view voice says "Yes, Erin"

Codex; First in a serialized graphic novel/comic book

English

Coming of age story; science fiction genre