Paper Girls vol. 4

After my experience with the previous volume I can now say that my biggest issue with this series has now been resolved:  Erin is the “new girl,” Tiffany is the gamer girl, KJ is the lesbian with a hockey stick, and Mackenzie is (as always) the bitchy redhead.  Now that I’m finally able to keep the cast straight in my head, what does vol. 4 have to offer us? How about a version of New Year’s Day 2000 where Y2K panic was in full swing.  If that doesn’t sound thrilling enough for you, then it’s good that creators Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang thought to bring in some invisible giant robots duking it out across the town.  Only Tiffany can see them, but that’s not the biggest shock she encounters in this era after she finds out that she’s dating a vampire-y goth guy she met at business school. As for the other three girls, they’re following a lead from the time travellers they met back in vol. 1 to track down the artist of a comic strip that’s been passing them knowledge through the years.

Being able to finally keep the cast straight in my head goes a long way towards making this volume easier to enjoy than vol. 3.  What it can’t fix is the nagging sensation that I’m not going to be able to determine if this series will have been worth my time until the very end.  That’s mainly because all of the action here still feels like setup towards the title’s ultimate goal. From everything the comic strip artist has to say, to what the Grand Father experiences here, to KJ’s realization about her sexuality and Mackenzie’s reaction to it, they all feel like the next part of a story rather than something that can be enjoyed on its own terms.  The increasingly complicated time-travel aspects of the story don’t do it any favors either, along with Vaughan’s increasingly frustrating decision to have the future teens speak in their own symbolic language. Yes, you can Google up a translation for it, but if that’s possible then why bother doing it in the first place? I still have no complaints about the stellar art from Chiang, though it’s not enough to make me hope that the series will be reaching its conclusion sooner rather than later.