Even though Mac is still gonna die of cancer. Erin dies in 2016 helping the girls through a Folding. Tiff dies saving the girls from a Future Cop. KJ’s fate has been completely unknown, but she might be the final piece of the puzzle here.

In the previous storyline, the girls fumble their way through the year 2171. We learn that Wari and Jahpo traveled with Dr. Qanta Braunstein to her time period. We learn that Jahpo is Grand Father out to get the girls. We learn that this is when Jahpo ambushed the girls in 1988. We learn that Mac is dying of time-travel related cancer. We learned a lot of things! A lot threads got tied up.

Now Not-Erin is back from her stint as a jerk to be a bigger jerk to the girls. She led them to what she thought was their deaths, but each one got transported to a different time. Hopelessly separated, we’re going to see just how they handle their situations, with luck reconvene, and wrap up this story nicely. I hope. Or it’s going to be like Season 6 of Lost and everything will become a giant turd. It could really go either way, I guess.

Paper Girls, Issue #26 [March, 2019]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

Erin is dreaming again. In her Issue #1 dream, she had been holding an apple. Here, a McDonald’s apple pie in its wrapper.

A nearby tree, the Tree of Knowledge, has an open mouth in its trunk. A horrifying visage with glowing red eyes and teeth! It has teeth, man! Hanging from its brances are apples and McDonald’s apple pies alike. “THE BODY OF CHRIST!” it yells at Erin, who is wearing a wedding dress. “Wait. You want me to eat this?” she frowns. “Does it get me kicked out of paradise or invited in?”

Behind her, Erin’s sister Missy points a Laser Tag gun at the back of her head, intending to put her out of her misery… but she gets zapped into oblvion by a sharp-dressed Tiff. A white hat with a matching white suit over a blue shirt. White tie. “Now listen up, I came all this way to tell you something important. If you want to get back home, you have to moonwalk, understand?”

Erin knows this is a dream. Tiff disagrees. It’s a message, “and if you forget…” Tiff’s face melts away into a bloody mess, “…we’re all gonna burn in hell.”

*wake up time*

Erin is surrounded by trick-or-treaters and a couple of parents. Trump, Walter White, Eleven from Stranger Things, Pennywise, and something else. I don’t know! “It’s okay Erin, you’re safe now.”

And it’s, like, who the HELL are you people?

“My son said you fainted,” says Walter White.

“And we found your A.N.D.G. card,” says Eleven.

American Newspaper Delivery Guild. “Aaron” scribbled out and replaced with “Erin”. Member number 3905137.

She’s asked where the rest of her trick-or-treat group is. Surely she’s not trick-or-treating alone like a loser! You know who you are! Erin barely has a chance to talk when the Trump kid points at the sky and comments on its violetness. The group stares up; Erin breathes a word: “…moonwalk…”

Elsewhere, Grand Father Jahpo and his crew of time travel dorks have left 2016 at their usual trajectory, but their travel has been interrupted. They’re not even in a time anymore! They’re all kinds of in-between!

According to their latest records, their Main Folding has been closed off by a group of girls. See, there’s the hologram right there! Four paper girls and a Not-Erin. “Five youths,” Cardinal says, “but that’s all I can tell you.”

Cardinal does find these kids familiar, but she has NO readings of anything about them. No past histories, not even vitals. Jahpo wonders if these girls are the same four they lost in 1988. “What if we all just passed each other?”

Come on, you bumblefucks! Get it together! You’re supposed to be masters of time, and you’re letting four scared 12-year-olds run the show! Cardinal does point out that the girls seem to be wearing ‘80s clothing, yes, “but what about this one?” she points to Not-Erin. “She’s dressed more like one of our shitty descendants.”

This is the part where Jahpo and Cardinal witness Not-Erin blowing them up into different time periods. Cardinal thinks they were killed, but Jahpo knows. Jahpo always knows. Except the hundreds of times so far where he didn’t know. “By scattering these girls into different corners of the hypercube, she didn’t just bend a single year inside itself, she–”

A FOLDING HAS APPEARED! But not a violet Folding. This is a bright yellow, perfectly square Folding. “Breach!” Cardinal yells.

Three vague human-shaped blobs appear in the Folding, not fully materializing. Jahpo pulls out a big gun. It’s obviously time to get crude. It’s the Wild West now, baby! Yee haw!

KJ is not happy, by the way. “Where the hell am I this time?” she grumbles, snatching newspapers from the nearest boy. “Did you fellas hear that?” says a boy on a bike. “The girl, she… she cussed.”

Hmm. 1958. “Guess it could have been worse.”

KJ ducks as some cops start heading her way, obviously checking out whatever loud sound KJ made when she landed in the ‘50s. One boy squirrels her away into the Cleveland Preserver building while another boy makes a diversion. “Glorious afternoon, officers!”

The boy with KJ asks her what happened. Suddenly there was a bang and she was just standing there “like you stepped out of the Flash Gordon funnies.”

KJ looks around the building curiously as men work the printing presses. She asks the boy if the strip had started running a strip called ”Frankie Tomatah”. Hell yes! It’s a laugh riot! “I have to find the guy who draws it,” she says. “His daughter, more importantly.”

Here we go, KJ is going to single-handedly cause Charlotte Spachefski’s obsession with time-travelers. The boy offers to help KJ… as long as she gives him her “swell boots”. He threatens her with a blackjack.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she glares at this dumb kid. She’s going to slap the shit out of him. Just wait, sh–

Yep! He tells her to stay back, but she grabs his arm and shoves him against a bookshelf. She gets right up to his ear.

Needless to say, this kid is satisfactorily scared out of his wits. KJ leaves, intent to find this Charlotte Spachefski herself.

Ah yes, Mac is definitely not in 1958, unless she’s in 1958 and just on some planet with terrifying giant-plankton creatures with razor sharp teeth. Or something out of East of West.

Before it has a chance to eat her, someone off-panel zaps the giant bug in much the same way that Dream Tiff zapped Dream Missy. A woman stands tall, dressed like the Statue of Liberty, holding a nice-looking walking cane. “I know you,” she says, sizing up Mac.

Hell yeah, you know her. They’re knuckleheads from the prehistoric days! “You’re… you’re the lady who invented time travel,” Mac says, staring up at the one and only Dr. Qanta Braunstein. She thought Mac and the other girls made it home. What gives? What are you doing here in some gross wasteland talking to the one and only Dr. Qanta Braunstein? “When I finally got back to the late 21st century, the first thing I did was dig up what happened to you… to each of you.

Mac looks around nervously. Yeah yeah, died of Time Cancer. Braunstein shares her condolences. You know, little one, Braunstein herself is Patient Zero of Time Cancer? What a world! If she had never invented time travel, she would have never invented Time Cancer. “That’s why I came here,” Braunstein says, motioning toward the desolate expanse, “to die with the rest of our planet.”

This is where Mac is like “buh-what”. Yes, Mac is at the end of the Earth. Just shy of five billion years old, Earth is going to get hit by a gamma-ray burst from a nearby galaxy and permanently extinguish all life on the planet. In fact, it’s 38 seconds away! You have time to microwave a burrito.

When asked why she voluntarily sent herself to the end of the world, Braunstein thought it would be cool to “hang on until the finish line”. Sounds poetic to me. I’m wondering if getting hit with a gamma-ray burst would be a super quick way to go. That’s the stuff.

“Are you all right?” she asks Mac, who is definitely not all right. “How did you end up here?”

The only thing Mac says is “I kissed a girl.”

The only thing Braunstein says is “Oh.”

We end with Tiff. It’s hard to describe exactly what her era looks like, so a picture is worth at least three or four words.

“Tiffany Quilkin! I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you,” says her mysterious assailant. Someone who looks like Erin wearing a robe. Behind her is some sort of futuristic igloo. Perhaps a yurt.

“This is your fault!” Tiff yells before handily tackling the girl. “What did you do to my friends?!” She is ready to punch the daylights out of this kid, who insists that she’s not the evil Not-Erin! Not Not-Erin! Cut some slack, brah! She’s one of the good guys, right?

“It was the first genetic duplicate of Erin Tieng who detonated the device that brought you here. Her generation was a lot… angrier than mine.” But hey, those four legendary paper girls are the reason the war is over. The war with the Old-Timers. It’s over! “Welcome to a harmonious utopia of complete global peace,” Not-Not-Erin says about the shithole Tiff has found herself in. “Can I get you some hot chocolate?”

No one got blown up. She promises. “You were safely transported thousands of years in your future. So you could help us.”

Help end the war! Are you paying attention. Don’t bother trying to figure out the meddlesome timeline inconsistencies. Not-Not-Erin leads Tiff into her igloo thing, which ends up being quite expansive. Down, down, down a twisty, spiral staircase leads to a chamber with three other futuristic people preparing a sort of virtual reality chair.

“Unlike the Old-Timers, we still have hope. We still have dreams.”

Final Thoughts

SOMETHING NEFARIOUS IS GOING ON! I’m confused and ANGRY. Get to the part where KJ finally finds her future self and she’s fat and eating a ton of Cheetos all the time. Please.