I don’t usually write reviews for comics, but I read the entire 6 volume series over 3 days, so I wanted to say a little something about the series as a whole. Paper Girls isn’t new, it’s been around long enough that the series was finished before I ever started reading it. It seems like a lot of people have read it because of Saga’s fame, but it doesn’t have as good reviews as Saga, so I was sitting on reading it for a long time. Ultimately, I decided to give it a go because I found the entire series at my local library and I’ve always thought the artwork for the series looked gorgeous!

I heard it was a bit confusing to read, but I didn’t find it that bad. Saga’s always been a bit confusing and jumped around from character to character, so while I didn’t know exactly what was happening in Paper Girls, it wasn’t as difficult to follow as I thought. Plus it was made easier by the fact that I really liked the 4 main characters. 

Paper Girls is about 4 girls from the 1980’s who accidentally get catapulted into a different year when time travellers infiltrate their town on Halloween. They’re sent to the future and spend the next 6 volumes hopping around through time trying to get back to their reality. They meet people from other worlds and even get to meet future versions of themselves. The only thing I didn’t quite grasp was how the whole time travel thing gets initiated in the first place, but it was a fun romp through space and time, so I was able to overlook it.
 
The characters are all around 12 years old I believe, which I thought was a bit young, but it has really strong stranger things vibes and I really liked the artwork and time period. I didn’t like the homophobic slurs that are written into the text, I know the authors were trying to make it indicative of the time period, but I don’t think it was necessary, nor did I really think if fit the character of the paper girls. 

My favourite volume was Volume 3 because I really liked Wari. There are a lot of other side characters that come and go throughout the series, but I wish there had been more consistency between some of these characters. For example, I liked that Wari returned and that we got several versions of Erin and Tiffany, I thought they were really strong. But then some of the other characters seem to only be there briefly and I’m not sure they added a lot to the text. I’m struggling to remember all their names now, but thinking of the old woman (Charlotte?), the Prioress, and the other character on the front of Volume 5 (is it implied that this character is a future version of Mac? because that was never clear to me, but would make her inclusion more important). Otherwise I didn’t think any of these characters really added much.

Anyways, it’s a weird series of course, but I did like it. It’s not a long read and worth it is you want something fun!