March Discussions for Most of Our Groups

North Park

North Park started their annual complete comic series read this year with the first three volumes of Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, Jared K. Fletcher, and Dee Cunniffe. Paper Girls is the story of four pre-teen newspaper delivery girls (Erin, MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany) in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio as they make their rounds the morning after Halloween in 1988. After meeting up to deliver papers together they become caught up in a war between two time-travelling factions: pterodactyl-mounted armored future establishment “Old-Timers,” and alien-language speaking teenagers from even further in the future who raid the past. Soon the girls are flung into the “future” of 2016 as well as thousands of years into the past and are frequently separated as they try to get back to their home time of 1988, meeting future versions of themselves along the way.

Kha led our discussion this month, and while some members wanted to focus on the mechanics of time travel and the narrative threads of what was happening, others felt that it wasn’t really trying to make sense. The time travel was just a means to an end of the story, with one member likening it to the level of science of the Back to the Future movies. Once they just went with the flow, they enjoyed the story much more. One highlight of these three volumes was one character, Erin, meeting herself 18 years in the future and coming to terms with her expectations of adulthood versus how she actually turned out. North Park had read the first volume a few years ago, and some of the members who weren’t the biggest fans then liked it more with the next two volumes to flesh out the story and especially the characters.

While everyone liked the style and pencils of Cliff Chiang’s art, what really stood out for everyone was Matt Wilson’s colors. Everyone loved the bright colors and tones that Wilson used in the different time periods. From the purple-pink sky while the time-travelers fought to the surreal hues of the numerous dream sequences, Wilson was a huge standout in their discussions, prompting one member to declare that she’s going to find everything he has colored to read (which was exactly the same thing she said when the group discussed one of his other projects, the second volume of Phonogram over a year ago). Everyone was excited to read the next half of the series, if for nothing else than to hopefully have some of their time-travelling questions answered.

In April North Park will travel a year into the past from Paper Girls timeline to tackle Watchmen, the 1987 classic by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins that helped herald American comics’ transition from the kid stories to a medium worthy of adult attention.