Paper Girls Volume 3

The third volume of Paper Girls is the best yet, as Vaughan and Chiang continue to deepen these characters and broaden the scope-- yet also this one feels more focused, and as though it tells a discrete story of its own. Clearly each volume of Paper Girls will place the paper girls in a different time period; in this one they materialize in the Pleistocene, and 1) must hunt down a time machine, 2) encounter a cave woman and her child, 3) encounter a future woman born in 2016, 4) discover still more time portals and the strange objects that have come through them, 5) see the future, and 6) deal with the complicated feelings of, um, blossoming womanhood. While volume 2 focused on Erin, volume 3 places more emphasis on KJ.

It's great work. show more The characters feel more real with each passing chapter, and Vaughan and Chiang do some neat stuff with the comics form. Loved how the vision of the future was rendered, loved the two-page spread when KJ is on the run from the cavemen. A good combination of art, character, and story in each case. This book is strong, and it promises more strength to come; I look forward to reading volumes 4 and 5 soon. show less

This series has had my devotion from the first page of volume 1. These girls are smart, tough, loyal, brave, and awesome, and they do all that while still being kids. Their personalities are dynamic, and they grow and develop endlessly. The story line is suspenseful and gripping. I love everything about Paper Girls! What impresses me most, though, is that a male author does such an exceptional job of writing almost entirely from a female perspective. The vast majority of the characters so far have been women and girls. There is no unnecessary sentimentality, and he even approached the most mystifying of female issues...the dreaded and mysterious menses. Right on, Mr. Vaughan. It happens, no point in skirting around it.

Paper girls is crazy good. Crazy insane good. Like the plot shouldn't work, but it does, and I'm not sure why. It hits all the right buttons - from crazy time lines, cave men whose time is the futures dumping ground, and some kick-ass girls, navigating growing up while just trying to survive what the future throws at them.

Highly recommended, but start at the first book in this series.

Continues to be fun, but still not 100% hooked.

I don't expect a comic featuring alternate universe time travel cavepeople to be a thesis on paleolithic culture, but I must note that I'm bummed out by stories that portray patriarchy as eternal and inevitable. There were no doubt some bossy, grumpy menfolk in the Pleistocene, but many of our ideas about violent alpha male cavemen are projections of modern assumptions on the past. I'm so much interested in reading stories about a past where women had agency and their labor and contributions were necessarily valuable. /soapbox

(That said, I loved the bit where the cavefolk think that a child can have more than one father—people in the past sometimes had very shaky ideas about human show more reproduction.) show less

Paper Girls Volume 3 written by Brian K Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang is, obviously, the third volume in the Paper Girls comic series. I have previously read and reviewed Volume 1 and Volume 2. This is the kind of series that tells a single ongoing story, so I don't recommend starting anywhere other than Volume 1 if you haven't already read the previous volumes/issues. This review contains spoilers for the previous volumes.

In this volume we see the four paper girls in prehistoric times continuing their disturbing adventure. They meet some more strange people as well as some... slightly less strange people. Some strange aspects introduced earlier start to make more sense in this volume, while other new mysteries are show more encountered.

I found this volume to be an enjoyable continuation of the ongoing story. I feel like this is getting to be one of those series where it's hard to review a volume on its own (I have similar problems reviewing Saga) because it really is just a chapter in a story that isn't finished. I am enjoying the format which introduces the setting of the next volume at the end of the previous one. It gives me something to look forward to when I get my hands on Volume 4.

I have been really enjoying Paper Girls and I recommend it to fans of SF, time travel, and weird stuff. For the optimal reading experience you should definitely start with Volume 1 rather than coming into the story in the middle. This is a series I plan to keep reading to completion.

4.5 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. show less

This was a super enjoyable installment in the series; I laughed so much reading it! The ONLY thing holding me back from giving it a full 5 stars is the continuing lack of answers. There's still no true hint about what's causing all this, or who is sending the girls time traveling. I don't need everything spelled out to me but little clues would really help tighten the plot. There's no resolutions of ANY sort happening.
Still, amazing artwork and colors, the humor is spot on, and I'm loving the characters more with each page!

The Eisner and Harvey Award-winning 80s hommage scifi series Paper Girls continues with Volume 3, where we see our pre-teen heroes, Erin, Mac, KJ and Emily, getting sent back to prehistoric times.

Written by Brian K. Vaughan (Saga) and illustrated by Cliff Chiang (Wonder Woman), Paper Girls is a Stranger Things-esque tale with a sci-fi mystery and female friendship at its core. It starts out with our main characters, four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls in the ‘80s, doing their normal paper route early one Halloween morning. Queue the madness. Immediately by the first issue’s end, it gets crazy. Mysterious forces from the future attack their Cleveland suburb (Volume 1, collecting issues 1-5), they’re transported to 2016 show more (Volume 2, collecting issues 6-10) and eventually end up on what seems to be a different world (Volume 3, collecting issues 11-15).

This brings us to Volume 3 where the girls travel back to prehistoric times, and the reader gets to spend more time with KJ, who was largely absent from the second volume. The four paper girls are reunited in a completely new place somewhere far off in the past, and run into a savage young women named Wari who looks vaguely native American except for the technojunk strung around her neck. A woman from the future named Doctor Quanta Braunstein shows up in a fancy suit and cool hairstyle, while Tiffany and Erin start to bond with the primitive girl Wari and her baby Jahpo. It turns out that three men are after Wari for her baby, and somehow they all claim fatherhood. They look a bit like Uruk-Hai Berserkers covered with mud, and they too have some technological flotsam to go with their stone axes. These three cave-men run into and capture Doctor Braunstein, while the girls try to come up with a plan to get back to 1988.

It's all a bit wild and a fun wild. Young girls crushing Pleistocene patriarchy! I wonder where Vaughan will take us and the girls in Volume 4? show less