In case anyone hasn't been to their comic shop today, I definitely recommend Paper Girls. It's by Brian Vaughn (Saga) and Cliff Chiang (Wonder Woman), and it starts out really strong. Plus it's a double-size issue for $2.99. If you're on the fence, take a chance... this is a really well-done comic, and as usual. Vaughn supplies a hell of a last-page twist.
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"Paper Girls" is my "Pick of the Week." I've read quite a bit about it and have been looking forward to it, but I haven't read it yet. (I usualy read periodical comics on Saturday mornings.)
Being a paperboy and reading comic books. This is a series that’s hits close to home for me (although I was a paperboy about 10 earlier than this series is set). Before become a paperboy, depending on the season, I earned my money by cutting grass or raking leaves or shoveling snow. My mom used to beg me no end about the money I would spend on comic books. “If you would just get a job I wouldn’t care what you spend your money on,” she lied. (She continued to ask, “When are you going to quit buying those things?” all the way through college. I was probably in my 30s before she gave up.)
Anyway, she pushed me into getting that job, and I kept it all throughout junior high school. I had around 80 deliveries to make, in a neighborhood some distance from my own. Every weekday I would come home from school to find a bundle of newspapers I first had to roll before I delivered them. Then my mom would drive to to the far end of my route and I would walk back. All this for about $30 a month… a dollar a day. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. I used my route to expand my lawn mowing customers, which is where I made my real money. Christmas time was lucrative because of the high tips. January always saw a big surge in new carriers; the outgoing carriers would keep their routes through tip season.
I always aspired to be paper carrier of the month. I was scrupulous about putting the paper on the porches and I tried never to miss a house. On the rare occasions I did, I was devastated whenever a pink COMPLAINT form was on the top of my daily bundle. I would always go to the door with two papers (that day’s and the previous day’s) and apologize. I later found out there was one way and one way only to become carrier of the month, and that was to sell subscriptions. That revelation turned me into a cynic.
Paper Girls #1 was pretty good. I find it highly unlikely that carriers would double up on each other’s routes, and delivering papers that early in the morning rather than after school goes against my experience, too, but other than that, it made me nostalgic for my paper route and reminiscent for the ‘80s. I’m curious to see where the story goes from here.
I delivered a weekly paper (a few different ones) and would deliver after school, too. But a lot of daily papers put out morning editions, and I'm sure someone was delivering them, too.
The doubled up routes seems only to be for the one day, for safety. It seemed pretty reasonable to me, considering the jerks they knew would still be away from Halloween.
I thought this was very well-written and beautifully drawn, both of which were expected. I like how he wrote teenagers without making them annoying.
That said, I eventually got tired of Ex Machina and then Saga, so I'm not sure what to make of this. I still haven't finished reading Y the Last Man. If I continue reading this, it will most likely be in trade form based upon what I hear and read.
Don't miss this month's Image + (free with the purchase of Previews) for a double-page center poster of the Paper Girls.
Also, having had great success over the years with the pasta recipes Howard Chaykin presented in American Flagg!, I tried making one of the recipes from the letters page of Paper Girls #6. (I'll leave it up to you to guess which one.)
This is a great article from NPR about Stranger Things that cites Paper Girls as a part of a "kids on bikes" genre. It's a really good read.
If you want to continue down that road, I recall a well-received Lemon Cake recipe in Kurt Busiek and David Wenzel's A Wizard's Tale.
Jeff of Earth-J said: