Paper Girls #10 Review

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan / Artist: Cliff Chiang / Image Comics You know one of the most fun things about good YA fiction? The kids are smart. Not only smart, but 20% smarter than we were at their respective age. They’re 20% cleverer, 20% faster, 20% wiser than what we can reasonably give ourselves credit for, and in that way we look up to them with a type of weird, impossible aspiration for our younger selves. That’s something that separates good YA fiction from the eye-rolling that comes from lazier youth-focused writing that sells young people short as narrowly dim or irresponsible. It’s something Paper Girls captures well – these Erin, Tiffany, Mac, and KJ are all unique, and all making the best decisions they can with the limited life experience they have. And their decisions are 20% better than me and my friends might have made. When we left the girls they were faced with a decision: trust a slick-talking kid-Erin from a distant future who promises to reunite them with their lost friend KJ, or trust adult-Erin, also from the future, who’s openly as confused as they are about all the craziness happening around them. And the girls choose… the wrong choice. That is, until kid-Erin gets impatient and shows her hand as the nefarious character to side with, and the girls pull a childhood classic move to save their skins, at least for now.

As the plot unfolds as slowly as ever, we barely know much more than we did, say, 5 issues ago. And the way it’s going, that’s not a bad th…