Paper Girls vol. 5

While this series hasn’t been on the level of writer Brian K. Vaughan’s best work, this penultimate volume actually puts it in a good place ahead of its finale.  The girls, along with along with the Future Tiffany they picked up in the previous volume, have landed in the far future of 2171 and are on the hunt for some answers as to how to get home.  So naturally they head to the local library to get some, and maybe find out if this future has a cure for the cancer that’s going to kill Mackenzie.  The problem is that, as a result of the events of the previous volume, they’ve landed on the radar of one Jahpo Thapa who runs the organization which polices the streets and the timestream known as the Watch.  He’s been waiting a long time to get these girls to answer for what they’ve done. It just so happens that if he doesn’t it might mean the end of the world for everyone involved.

“Paper Girls” has always felt like Vaughan’s attempt to engineer his own kind of “puzzle box” story.  Where all sorts of questions are set up from the start and you’ve just got to have some kind of faith in the writer that all this is going to make sense in the end.  The good news is that it looks like that might actually happen after what we learn in this volume. Through the magic and convolutions of time-travel we actually learn what Jahpo was up to in the first volume, and the stakes are clearly identified going forward from here.  Sustaining patience in Vaughan’s vision would’ve been easier if the four main leads had been more distinctive characters. I mention this because what should’ve been a revelatory moment between MacKenzie and KJ doesn’t come off that way. It feels more like they’re just succumbing to fate.  Still, the fact that everything looks to be coming together, and Cliff Chiang’s appealingly gonzo vision of the future, make this volume of the series the strongest one since its first.