Book-A-Day 2018 #186: Paper Girls, Vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

So there's a time-war, right? People further up the timeline (the "kids") are trying to fix things they don't like in history, and people closer to our time (the "parents") are trying to keep history as they experienced it. It's not entirely clear if they really are two subsequent generations of the same population -- or, actually, if that concept even makes sense in the context of a time-war to begin with. But one group is "younger" and the other is "older."

This is a universe where time is infinitely malleable, so each change rewrites the timeline until it's in turn rewritten by the next change. But maybe the people in the middle of the time-war know what the changes were, so they can keep reverting them, like some transdimensional Wikipedia edit war.

Well, maybe not infinitely malleable -- there's at least one zone where time travel can happen spontaneously, which is the kind of thing that a writer may later mention was caused by some sort of "wearing out the tape" metaphor, that the successive time-changes actually start to break down the fabric of space-time itself.

That explanation hasn't happened yet. It may never happen. But I wouldn't be surprised to see it.

Four tween girls, all out delivering newspapers early in the morning of November 1, 1988, were in that zone, and have been jerked around that time-war for four volumes now. (I've written about the first three volumes: one and two and three.) They've been to "our time" and to prehistory, and in this volume they make it to Y2K land, where the time warriors are using stealthed battle mechs to fight it out in the sky, for no apparent reason other than it is Really Cool.

It's a comic book -- Paper Girls, Vol. 4, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Cliff Chiang. It's an action story mostly about women, which is nice. And it's pretty smart and twisty so far, though a cynical reader (such as me) may wonder if there are actual answers to the mysteries -- the thing about a time-war is that you can always wipe out one set of explanations with another (better, we hope) one at any time.

So, this time, the girls get back to the early moments of The Year 2000! and the two sides are battling in giant robots -- something we haven't seen before. Why?

Why not?

And why do the future people speak a jarring horrible pseudo-leet-speek jargon -- both the younger side of the "parents" generation and all of the "kids" generation? And why do the older parents speak standard English? And are the group that speak in an alphabet that looks very vaguely Korean yet a third generation, or just an offshoot from the two warring sides we sort-of know?

(It's Cool! And distancing! And futuristic! But mostly Cool!)

We are twenty issues and over four hundred pages in at this point, and answers are still thin on the ground. One begins to suspect the whole point is to depict a time-war where everything changes continually, so there can be new stunning reversals and surprises into the future forever.

I'd take Paper Girls' occasional feints at an undertone of "look how your adult life turned out -- not what you wanted, huh?" more seriously if they connected -- to each other, to the main plot, to anything. More and more, it feels like a collection of moments loosely arranged, with a common theme and set of characters, like a Tarot deck than can be reshuffled and dealt out, over and over again.

They're still good moments, true. The characters are well-developed and as real as any people in modern adventure comics. And Chiang draws all the strange technology and people as solid and believable. So I might just be back for the next book.

But I do expect that we'll be talking about Paper Girls issue #50 before too long, with a brand-new shocking revelation that's completely different from the shocking revelations in number 40, 30, and 25. And that it will stay in that mode as long as people keep buying it. And I'm getting to an age where I don't like encouraging behavior like that anymore.