Paper Girls, Vol. 6 by Vaughan and Chiang

I'm glad a I waited a year to finally read the end of the fun but overly-complicated Paper Girls series: I was basically hate-reading the earlier volumes, despite their many strong qualities (see my posts on volumes one, two, three, four, and five), and the extra year gave me some distance.

I mean, yes, Paper Girls, Vol. 6 is still obvious and jarring, full of elements that are thrown in seemingly because writer Brian K. Vaughan likes them or artist Cliff Chiang really wanted to draw them. The story doesn't track at all from beginning to end of Paper Girls, and this conclusion is largely driven by newly-arriving characters asserting things confidently that we the readers (and the main characters) have no reason to believe and every reason to doubt. But Vaughan and Chiang needed to end the thing, so they did, with all of the blood and thunder at their disposal.

Now, Paper Girls was always a great-looking series. Every page was glorious. The writing on a page-by-page basis was equally good, frankly -- it's just when those pages add up....or, more accurately, failed to add up in important ways...the overall story turns into less than the sum of its parts. Vaughan does the SFnal equivalent of the old Chandlerian "have two guys with guns come through the door whenever you get the plot confused" a couple of times in this volume alone, and it's probably the best metaphor for the series: Paper Girls is just groups of two guys with guns, coming through doors over and over again until finally it ends.

But it's just comics, right? As look as it looks cool and makes superficial sense -- and there's really cool ideas and images -- we don't care about little things like plot and story and believability, right?

(Maybe some of you.)

The best time-travel fiction makes the reader pay close attention and challenges her thoughts and assumptions. Paper Girls asks the reader to lay back and watch as a sequence of crazy stuff happens, and not to ask too many questions about how all of the crazy stuff connects in a coherent way. For readers who want kinda-OK time-travel fiction, that might be enough.