Paper Girls, Vol. 1

It's the early hours of the day after Halloween, and four young girls' paper rounds are about to get very weird indeed...before most people have eaten their breakfast, the girls will encounter mysterious hooded figures talking gibberish, some kind of space capsule, futuristic knights riding pteranodon like dragons, and more.

Brian K Vaughan's SAGA is my favourite ongoing comic series, and this sees him taking that super imaginative pulp SF vibe and putting it firmly into an Earthbound location, and even more firmly into a 1980s setting. There are intriguing ideas here, and I like the art and it's palette of blues and purples a lot, but it's hard to be any more positive than that at this stage. The four principals feel a little underdeveloped so far, in contrast to the way everyone fell in love with SAGA's cast from the off. I like the way the story piles mystery on top of mystery, but a lot will depend on the resolution of those mysteries. Vaughan has thrown an awful lot of balls into the air, and at the moment we have no idea where any of them are going to land. There's a lot of promise here, and this could turn out to be a brilliant series, or it could just as easily collapse into a shambolic mess. I'll stick around to find out, but I'm not completely onside yet.