Paper Girls, Volume 2: 09/14/17

Paper Girls, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan opens in the present days (2016). The paper girls now like Samurai Jack need to get back to the past — if they can fix things in their future first.

There are two ways to do time travel stories. The first is to make it so the travelers can't visit themselves on the timeline. The other is the oft-repeated meeting of oneself as the timeline unravels.

Volume two takes the latter approach. The girls are picked up by an older Erin — an Erin who is my age and has experienced the last thirty years, including the recent election. Her recollection of events has no bearing on young Erin's version of things — the last memory they can agree on is the first few minutes of when Erin met up with the other paper girls.

The majority of this volume's action is set inside a shopping mall — one that has been shuttered for a decade. It serves as a dystopian marker for the paper girls, while bringing to mind another 1980s time travel story that has its second act inside a mall — Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989).

There's also the on-going metaphor of Apple being the modern day fruit of knowledge. Modern day Erin can run the future version of the iPod or iPhone. The future seems to be under the control of Apple — an evil Apple — a sort of Big Brother Apple like the one they were claiming not to be with their ad introducing the first Macintosh.

Volume 3, which collects issues 11 through 15 came out in August.

Five stars

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