San Diego Comic-Con 2022 played host to the newest Prime Video series, Paper Girls, which tells the story of four different paper delivery girls in 1988 who are thrust into a time traveling mission to save the world. Series executive producers Chris Rogers, Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang sat down with PopWire.net to discuss the series, including the challenges of bringing Vaughan and Chiang’s comic to life.
“The tone is all there, the characters are there, the world is there,” Rogers began, touching on the comic book series. “You’re starting with such a great place. You really don’t want to f*ck it up!” Rogers delved into his connection to the source material. “I wouldn’t call myself a huge comic book fan, that said, I’ve read every word Brian K Vaughan ever wrote. The fact that they were doing it felt like, ‘Alright, let’s see what I can do.'”
“The comic happens over three or four nights, the whole thirty book run takes place over three or four nights,” Rogers continued. “If we kept up that speed in the show, it would be pretty dizzying. And I think we needed to have longer versions of those conversations and add some characters around the edges that would fill out their worlds. The backstory of these girls is so well suggested, but at the same time, getting to meet Mac’s brother, or someone that KJ is in a relationship with in the future- people that are suggested by the books, but we don’t actually get to spend time with- seemed like an advantage we had that they didn’t.”
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Vaughan elaborated on the changes TV shows based on his works need to make by saying, “Television is a totally different medium than comics. I think there are things comics can do that no other medium can, but in television, you have the advantage of time. We have eight hours to luxuriate in, and so there are moments in the comic where Mac has a brother who we maybe see once or twice in the comic and in the TV show, he becomes this fully fleshed out character. Cliff and I watched it and thought we should go back and do the comic again because this is so wonderful!
“If you’re a hardcore fan of the comic, we want to invite you in, but we want to surprise you,” Vaughan said. “It was giving the writers that freedom to say, ‘Don’t hit every signpost.’ If you think you know what’s going to happen, you don’t.” Since the series deals with time travel, the team had to do their homework on the mechanics of how time travel would work in the narrative, with Vaughan saying, “It’s so Goddamn hard! I was fortunate enough to work on ‘Lost’ during their time travel year and being in that writers’ room, I promised myself I would never work with time travel again!”
“You have to be so careful,” Vaughan continued. “It’s not something you can make up as you go along, you have to have a clear roadmap. It is planned carefully, but know you have to shift things around. We brought a lot of physicists in the room to talk about it, but since time travel is not real, it starts with what the story is trying to say metaphorically”
Chiang dived into the show’s cast of young actresses playing the four leads that he and Vaughan created. “When we first saw the girls, we were just amazed by how much they looked like the drawings. And then we saw them act and we were like, they’re like real girls. The story opened up and became so much more believable and so much more about focusing on the characters. My favorite part of the show is seeing them all interact.”
“There’s a scene in episode five that we haven’t seen on TV before,” Chiang continued. “You’re going to know it when you see it. It speaks to a moment with such honesty and sincerity and with humor and with a perspective that’s really integral to the show.”
Paper Girls streams on Prime Video on July 29.
