Brian K. Vaughan's 2015 comic book series is coming to Prime Video this Friday. "Four tweens who share a paper route in 1980s Cleveland get rerouted to 2019." If the TV series is as good as the comic book, it will be worth watching. Should appeal to fans of Stranger Things.
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Episode one was pretty good, very much like the comic as I remember it.
Anyone else watching this?
Oh, of course! Big fan of the comic, and just today I signed up for a paid subscription to Vaughan's Substack. I watched the first two episodes tonight, and enjoyed them very much. Like you, I find they match my memory of the comic. I should probably revisit it to double-check.
This morning Tracy shared with me Alan M.'s reaction on Facebook, something along the lines of the show captures the feel of the show without slavishly trying to duplicate every panel of the comic. I agree with that assessment. I think I'll hold off rereading the comic book series until we've seen the entire TV series (or first season, anyway). The comic book was its own thing, now I'm willing to sit back and the the TV show be its own thing. There used to be a time when a viewer could count on a TV adaptation of a comic book sucking hard, but that is no longer the case (at least, not always).
I'm a huge fan of the comic and I agree with that assessment. It differs from the comic, but it works on its own terms while keeping true to, let us say, the spirit of the original.
I posted a review of the first season here.
We watched episode four last night and, by this point, the show has diverged significantly from the comic. That's okay, though, because, as was the case with Resident Alien, the changes made for television are largely for the better. Huh. I never thought I'd see the day when television writers were as creative as comic book writers.
JD, I'll read your review as soon as we finish the season.
Link to Mark Sullivan's review of the first tpb.
I've posted a consolidated version of my two reviews (complete comic series and first season of the show) here.
My wife and I watched the first season over the last few days. We weren't blown away -- as we were by Stranger Things, the usual comparison -- but we enjoyed it and look forward to the second season.
I'm an outlier in that I didn't read the Paper Girls comics. I enjoy the work of both Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang, so it was just an oversight, not a decision. Now I don't suppose I ever will, since I'll get the gist of the story on TV. (I made the mistake of getting the full run of The Boys and Umbrella Academy when those shows started, got about halfway through both before the shows began, and now I have zero motivation to finish them.) Maybe I'll get whatever omnibus/deluxe edition they have just to support the troops.
From reading the above, I discover that Larry is a TV addition. That's a surprise, since he does serve to advance the plot in some important ways. Anybody else recognize actor Nate Corddry, who is also a Larry on For All Mankind?
We did enjoy the work of the central four actors, who all did very good jobs. Child actors used to be insufferable, but lately a talented bunch have changed that narrative in my head. I tried to figure out how old they really were, but IMDb.com didn't list birth dates and I wasn't interested enough to search further. But they're obviously not 12. And they're obviously not 18. They're young enough that the directors go out of their way to avoid showing Mac with a lit cigarette in her mouth. Sure, they talk about smoking a lot, but you don't actually see it, because the actor playing Mac clearly isn't old enough to legally smoke wherever this was filmed. (It's 16 in Tennessee, I believe.) So the guesses above of "15" may be right on the mark.
The Surprise Lesbian Reveal was practically telegraphed, with all the longing glances KJ was giving Mac from the get-go. And it's 2022, so if you get four girls on screen together, at least one of them's going to be gay. When the girls found out that the Brandmans were having a party, I turned to my wife and said, "KJ's going to find her older self kissing her girlfriend and that's how she discovers she's gay." Later, when KJ enters the party, I said, "the kissing scene will be upstairs." Which is exactly what happened. When KJ discovered Lauren, we both said "And there's the girlfriend." Despite the development being that obvious, KJ's consternation and later conversation with Lauren ("When did you discover you liked ... movies?") was deftly handled, not only the writing, but the delivery by both actresses. Well done.
The episode titled "Weird Al Is Dead" is, coincidentally, the second time a TV show has had that episode title in the last year. (The other show was Y: The Last Man.) Weird Al himself addressed this on Twitter, asking if the universe is trying to tell him something. Probably not. Maybe Brian K. Vaughn, who wrote both comics the shows were based on, is.
Speaking of the Brandmans' party, it was almost laughable how the two girls rifling all the purses and wallets kept pausing in their larceny long enough to have a couple of heart-to-hearts. Seriously, kids, anybody can walk in any minute, so snap it up, will ya? You are committing what is likely a felony.
Loved the mecha battle scene. It's entirely out of place, and yet, entirely cohesive with the story. Well done.
The script is very well done. Some of the lines made me laugh out loud. "Why does every dumb thing have a dumb name" and "evil Jerry Garcia" and "what kind of name is Wilder?" and so forth. Mac's pop culture references are always clever.
Since we've left 1999, I guess we'll never learn the fallout of Alice seeing Mac at the graveyard. I guess she'll write it off to grief making her see what she wanted to see.
All of the adult versions of the kids are disappointments to the kids (well, KJ is still up in the air), which I think would probably be true for any 12-year-old. I think all of us at that age imagine we’ll get more than the world is ready to give us, because we don't know enough about the world yet.
As noted above, Paper Girls didn't grab us in quite the way Stranger Things did. Maybe we're over our '80s nostalgia. But we did enjoy it.
Just finished watching episode two.
Whoops! Looks like there might be some spoilers in that post above. I'll read it later, when i read JD's.
I did locate my Paper Girls comics books (30 issues). Maybe I should reread the whole thing... I don't remember those first four pages at all. (I remember page five as the beginning.)
I wonder if this show has a soundtrack CD? Between Guardians of the Galaxy, Stranger Things and Paper Girls, those three have three decades of cheesy music down pat.
I started rereading the comic book yesterday (so far up to #9), finished watching season one of the television show last night and just now read all of this thread and all the links. The differences between the comic book and the TV are more profound than I remembered. Whereas the plot was simplified for a TV audience, it was also more focused (for an eight-episode "season"). As JD said in his review: "The source material features a bizarre, labyrinthine plot that ultimately proves perfectly coherent."
Regarding the smoking (or lack thereof), I don't think that has so much to do with the actress's age as it does the current social climate. (They could have supplied her with the fake cigarettes smoked by Tatum O'Neil in Paper Moon.) Last year I watched all 14 seasons of Bonanza, most episodes for the first time. At first I was surprised that it was given a "PG" rating on television. "It has guns in it," Tracy explained (plus insensitive racial depictions). My thought it, if was on TV in the '60s, today's delicate young flowers watching will be fine (assuming any are). But I digress.
Regarding the "Surprise Lesbian Reveal," that hasn't happened yet in the comics as of #9. I chalk the predictability of the way the plot played out is due to the short season length.
The most annoying aspect of the entire season was [SPOILER] the way the girls procrastinated in the very last episode. If they'd've just gotten their little asses aboard the ship, everything would have worked out fine (although there would have been no second season). [END SPOILER] Tracy and I were both screaming at the TV. that was the worst part of the season AFAIAC.
Regarding comparison to the source, the comic book is really quite significantly different than the show. I had the exact same experience Cap did (with The Boys and Umbrella Academy) when I started to read Resident Alien. But I think the Resident Alien TV show is better than the comic. It's not that the Paper Girls TV show isn't as good as the source, it's just different. As an adaptation into another medium, it is what it is. I'll give you one example. In the comic book, there is a third version of Erin Tieng, another 12-year-old, but this one is a clone. At one point, Erin and "old Erin" retrieve KJ's hockey stick from a time warp. On it is scrawled the message "Don't trust the other Erin." But who wrote it? And which Erin does it refer to?
Stranger Things is good, too, but Stranger Things doesn't involve time travel.
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