Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls might end up being Amazon's answer to Stranger Things
Okay, so get this: There’s this series that’s been running for a few years now, right, about a bunch of tweens trying to live their lives in the 1980s Midwest, riding their bikes, shooting the shit, and just generally coming of age. The only problem: Supernatural sci-fi crap keeps intruding into their lives, abducting their friends, killing people, and just generally making existence hell for everybody involved. We are, of course, describing Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic series Paper Girls, which Amazon has just announced it’s turning into its next big streaming phenomenon. Crazy, we know—but it just might work.
Vaughan is no stranger to YA streaming success, having been previously adapted by Hulu for its take on his beloved Runaways characters from Marvel. (Meanwhile, we now have the potential for yet another of his series to make it to air before the endlessly troubled Y: The Last Man TV show gets off the ground.) He and Chiang have been publishing Paper Girls for Image since 2015—i.e., a year before those other young sci-fi stars even started toasting their Eggos or rolling their dice—telling the tale of a quartet of young newspaper deliverers who find themselves caught up in an elaborate, mind-bending war between a bunch of time travelers. (It’s worth noting that the general tone of the book is less “Mmm, nostalgia,” though, and more generational conflict and “The ’80s were actually kind of a crappy time to be any kind of Other in America.”)
Vaughan is producing, while Toy Story 4 writer Stephany Folsom is writing the script.