2022 is proving to be a great year for '80s kids in bikes — or a terrible year, depending on whether you’re one of those kids or just enjoy watching them fight evil. After Netflix released the long awaited fourth season of its hit show Stranger Things between June and July, Prime Video has just made all eight episodes of its newest sci-fi coming-of-age story Paper Girls available to stream.
Based on the comic book series of the same name by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls has got it all: time-travel, giant robots, awkward conversations with future versions of yourself, and even more awkward first periods. However, fans that know Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Tiffany (Camryn Jones), KJ (Fina Strazza), and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) from the comics will quickly notice that a few things are not quite the same. A lot of the source material was changed in the story’s adaptation to the screen. Here are 15 differences between the Paper Girls comic series and its Prime Video counterpart.
1. How the Girls Meet
Episode 1 of Paper Girls has young Erin waking up with the chickens to do her first paper route on Hell Day, 1988, just like in the comics. However, in the show, she’s harassed by a racist neighbor that accuses her of stealing his paper and is rescued by Tiffany. The two girls later run into Mac and rush to help KJ, who is under attack by a gang of teenagers in costumes. In the comics, Erin is the one bullied by the teens, and the three more experienced paper girls come to her rescue.
2. The STF's Device
The mysterious device that is eventually revealed to be a supercomputer is given to the girls by Heck (Kai Young) and Naldo (William Bennett) in the show. In the comics, however, they pick up the device after it falls from the pockets of a mysterious Standard Time Fighter that attacks them during Hell Day. The original device also has the Apple logo on its back, which is how the girls realize it’s a kind of computer, but perhaps the show would’ve had to be picked up by a different streaming service if the writers wanted to keep that part in…
3. Meeting Adult Erin
The circumstances under which the girls meet adult Erin (Ali Wong) also differ slightly from the comics. While in the show they go to Erin’s house and run into a very freaked out older version of her, in Vaughan and Chiang’s story, the girls jump in front of adult Erin’s car as she’s driving and talking on the phone. Oh, and the person she’s talking to is her sister Missy (Jessika Van), about their very alive and emoji loving mother.
4. The Erins and the Tiffanys
As a comic series, Paper Girls is very plot-driven. Even though we do get to see the girls mature through their journey, there are only a few pages devoted to their backgrounds and inner lives. In the show, this kind of character exploration gets more space. To do that, however, the writers changed a couple of things regarding the girls’ relationships with their future selves. Adults Erin and Tiffany (Sekai Abenì), for instance, don’t have that much in common with their comic book versions.
Vaughan and Chiang’s Erin still lives in Stony Stream, but not in her childhood home. She’s a writer for the Cleveland Preserver, not a paralegal, and her mother is still very much alive. Missy is still a helicopter pilot, but the fraught relationship between the two sisters following their mother’s passing was created for the show. Comic book Erin is also a lot quicker to accept the girls as time-travelers and help them out, and young Erin is a lot kinder to her grown up self. Adult Erin also makes it out of all the time-travel shenanigans alive. Yes, she’s the one that activates the device and reads its instructions, but the tiny computer only leads them to the abandoned mall, where they run into yet another version of Erin (who might still appear in the show sometime in the future). Adult Erin is shot, but Missy saves the day, and the girls move on with their journey by themselves.
Adult Tiffany is more involved in the girls’ adventures than adult Erin, but not in quite the same way as she is in the show. In the comics, she was never kicked out of MIT due to a mental health crisis after finding out she’s adopted. Comics Tiffany has known about the adoption ever since she was a little kid, and as an adult, she attended business school in NYU. Her clothing style is a lot more goth, and instead of having a futureless relationship, she’s happily married to an equally black-clad young man. She’s not responsible for inventing time-travel, but she does take a trip to the future with her younger self.
5. KJ’s Self-Discovery
KJ’s quasi-relationship with her future self also changes quite a bit from the pages to the screen. In the comics, adult KJ never makes an appearance. In the show, on the other hand, KJ learns a lot about her grown-up self (Delia Cunningham), despite never sharing a scene with her. In 1999, she has a couple of enlightening conversations with adult KJ’s girlfriend, Lauren (Maren Lord), about their shared love for movies and other girls.
6. Mac’s Family
Mac’s tragic fate is the same in the comics and in the Prime Video series, though the type of cancer that eventually kills her changes from leukemia to cerebral lymphoma. However, in Vaughan and Chiang’s original story, she finds out about her death from an unknown man living in her childhood home who tells her that her family moved after their daughter’s passing. In the show, she tracks down her older brother Dylan, who became a doctor after witnessing his sister’s demise. Mac and Dylan share some really nice moments setting off firecrackers and chatting about their messed up childhood that are completely absent from the comics.
7. How Erin Gets Shot
Mac’s family as a whole isn’t that important in the show’s source material. The only person that readers do get to meet is her stepmom, Alice (Rebecca Spence), but not as the woman that stood by Mac’s bedside and takes flowers to her grave on her birthday. Readers are introduced to Alice when the girls take shelter in Mac’s home during the first Ablution. Having seen her husband being taken from their bed, Alice is convinced that they’re living through the Rapture and threatens to shoot herself on the head. While trying to take the gun away from her stepmom, Mac accidentally shoots Erin. In the show, Mac’s home is empty, and she ends up shooting Erin while trying to stop KJ from taking the gun from her.
8. KJ’s Hockey Stick and the Abandoned Mall
In the Prime Video series, KJ loses her hockey stick after killing a member of the Old Watch, who was incidentally the Prioress’ (Adina Porter) brother. The Prioress then uses the stick as a lead to find the girls. In the comics, the stick remains in KJ’s possession, and the girls use them to send a message through time that reaches young and adult Erin at the abandoned mall. The message warns them not to trust other Erin, and, for a second, it seems pretty clear to whom it refers. But things soon get a lot muddier when Tiffany and Mac arrive at the scene with a Standard Time Fighter that looks a lot like 12-year-old Erin…
9. Larry and Juniper
Speaking of Standard Time Fighters, Larry (Nate Corddry) and Juniper (Celeste Arias) were created solely for the show. In the comics, the girls do get some help from a dormant STF member in the 90s, but she’s a whole other character that may or may not appear in a second season of the series.
10. The STF’s Looks
The time-traveling members of the STF are a lot less dashing in the comics than they are in the show. While Prime Video Heck and Naldo still don their futuristic attire and are covered in metal pimples, as the Grand Father (Jason Mantzoukas) puts it, they lack the scars and boils that give them a mutant-like appearance. Their organization is also never given a proper name by Vaughan and Chiang.
11. The Old Watch’s Lingo
In the comics, both the STF and the Old Watch speak in ways that are pretty hard for a regular person to understand. But while the STF speaks in an entirely foreign language, represented in the pages by weird symbols, the vast majority of the Old Watch members, or simply Old-Timers, speak in a mixture of old English and contemporary slang, giving us gems like “Hold. R ye locals?”.
12. Monsters Everywhere
Apart from four paper girls jumping from one decade to another with a spaceship on their track, everything looks pretty normal in the Paper Girls TV universe. If you’re not associated with time meddlers of any kind, you can move on with our life without ever realizing that there’s something weird going on. In the comics, on the other hand, it’s pretty hard not to notice creatures such as pterodactyls and giant tardigrades taking advantage of the tears in the time-space continuum to fight each other right in the middle of the road. In the series, we only get to see one pterodactyl: the Grand Father’s pet, Tessa.
13. The Robot Fight
We also only get to see two robots fighting each other in the show, in a scene that ends with adult Erin’s death. The girls also get a good view of the battle, which ends up being pretty traumatizing for young Erin. In Vaughan and Chiang’s story, no Erins are harmed during the many mecha fights taking place simultaneously in 1999. The only named character that kicks it during one of these battles is the Prioress, and the only person that can see the giant robots going at it is Tiffany.
14. The Prioress’ Betrayal
The Prioress’ role in the series is a lot bigger than in the comics. In the show’s source material, she dies during a robot fight, and not much is revealed about her origin. In the show, viewers are told that the man that KJ killed was her brother and that she was dragged unwillingly into the time war as a child after an attack by the STF. In order to stop the war from ever beginning, she betrays the Old Watch and sends the girls back in time instead of erasing their memories to stop adult Tiffany from inventing time travel. She is then discovered by Grand Father and killed.
15. How the Girls Get Split Up
Okay, the girls do get split up a lot throughout their adventures in the comics, so maybe this is not a key difference per se. However, the way the show ends is entirely new to the Paper Girls universe. In the comics, the girls aren’t taken together to the Old Watch’s Cathedral and never travel in groups of two to different points in time. Erin and Tiffany’s journey to the 50s is a new addition to the story, and who knows where TV Mac and KJ have ended up. Hopefully, there will be a second season on the way to clear up these mysteries.
All 8 episodes of Paper Girls are available to stream on Prime Video.