'Paper Girls' TV Series, Based On The Brian K. Vaughan And Cliff Chiang Comic, Being Delivered To Amazon

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's acclaimed graphic novel series Paper Girls is headed to streaming. Amazon Studios just landed the rights to the comic, and plan to adapt it into a series. Stephany Folsom, co-writer of Toy Story 4, will pen the script for the Paper Girls TV series, which follows four pre-teen newspaper delivery girls dealing with mysterious forces. While the Paper Girls comic launched before Stranger Things, its likely Amazon is hoping to have a Stranger Things-style series of their own, and they may just have found it.

I have yet to read Paper Girls, because I have this weird quirk where I refuse to read any comic series run until it's finished. If I'm going to read a story, I want the whole story ready to go. That said, everything I've heard about the comic has been very positive, and makes me all the more excited to read it...when it's finished. Or I can just wait for the Paper Girls TV series, which is on its way, per Deadline. Here's a synopsis:

The series follows four young girls who, while out delivering papers on the morning after Halloween in 1988, become unwittingly caught in a conflict between warring factions of time-travelers, sending them on an adventure through time that will save the world. As they travel between our present, the past, and the future — they encounter future versions of themselves and now must choose to embrace or reject their fate. An emotional adventure in which the girls and the women they eventually become are tough, their friendships are authentic, and their journey through time is epic.

Paper Girls has a lot of visuals featuring kids on bikes dealing with the paranormal in the 1980s – a trope that's nothing new, but is in high-demand right now thanks to Stranger Things. While I've heard that Paper Girls is superior to Stranger Things, and even pre-dates that series by a year, I wouldn't be shocked to learn that Amazon wanted the series so they could launch their own Stranger Things. After all, they shelled out huge bucks to score the rights to Lord of the Rings, because they reportedly wanted their own Game of Thrones.

But while Stranger Things seems nostalgic for the '80s, Brian K. Vaughn was going for something different with Paper Girls. "One of my fellow collaborators and I were chatting. We were the age of the characters in Paper Girls in 1980, I was 12 years old," Vaughn said. "I remember a lot of aspects of that era fondly, but it also felt like, wow, there's a lot of fiction now about the 1980s that completely whitewashes a lot of the worst aspects of it. The casual hatred and homophobia was so pervasive. I think as creators we have an obligation – particularly in the young adult books, writing for an audience that was not alive then – to show them how far we have come and also how far we still need to go as a society."

Toy Story 4 writer  Stephany Folsom is set to write the script, and will produce the series along with Vaughn.