Vaughan, Chiang deliver 'Paper Girls' for Image Comics

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

It's probably safe to assume that only one comic book this year will feature four tween girls, two iconic creators and a hugely strange happenstance.

Debuting later this year from Image Comics, Paper Girls brings together a pair of old friends, writer Brian K. Vaughan (Saga) and artist Cliff Chiang (Wonder Woman), for a supernatural mystery adventure grounded by a bunch of ambitious 12-year-olds.

Set in the late 1980s, the ongoing series — announced today at ImageExpo in San Francisco — will follow four newspaper-delivery kids who experience something extraordinary, where what exactly has occurred isn't readily apparent. And other than their occupation, however, they have very little in common since they go to different schools and come from different backgrounds.

They're not friends or acquaintances at the beginning, according to Vaughan, though some of them are aware of each other: One of them is a pioneering sort who inherited her route from her brother. But, the writer says, there's much more to the story than youngsters throwing papers at doorsteps.

"Cliff and I are trading on the fact that we hope people trust us and will be willing to pick up this book and be surprised," Vaughan says. "There is definitely an epic scope that will reveal itself in the first issue."

Adds Chiang: "These are not your everyday 12-year-old girls. They're pretty cool."

The idea for Paper Girls comes from Vaughan's own childhood growing up around Cleveland at a time when, instead of laptops, people got their news from "kids on bicycles who woke up at 4 a.m. to hand-deliver stories of all the terrible things going on in the world to the sleeping adults," says the writer.

He remembers a sea change when he was 12 and all the paperboys were replaced by female counterparts. "They were the first of their kind but the last of a dying breed," Vaughan adds. "These 12-year-old girls, hardcore young entrepreneurs, would go out and deliver news and then shake down their clients for money. It always fascinated me."

The feel of Paper Girls is closer to Vaughan's coming-of-age superhero cult favorite Runaways than his post-apocalyptic Y: The Last Man or family sci-fi drama Saga. He also hopes to emulate the vibe of the Stephen King adaptation Stand by Me, the first R-rated movie Vaughan saw in a theater and one that "ripped my brain open" at age 10.

"Instead of being kids from young adult stories, these were real kids — they swore and smoked like kids I knew and the violence felt palpable and real," Vaughan explains. "Even though it was about 1959, which was 27 years in the past when I saw it in 1986, it made the past where I knew my dad had grown up feel at once totally alien and strange but also familiar and recognizable."

While the '80s setting feels fresh and just like yesterday to Vaughan, "I realize that to most young readers this going to feel very strange to see these latchkey kids who are allowed out of their house at 4 in the morning by themselves in the freezing cold. I'm not sure today's kids would be allowed to do something like that."

One of the things both Vaughan and Chiang love about the story is that it's about pre-pubescent children. Being 12 is an amazing age, the writer says. "Whatever you get into at around the age of 12 — it's true for me — is what you're going to be into the rest of your life."

Vaughan grew up with a lot of female friends, and he wanted to write a group of girl protagonists but not ones that, like most stories, were defined by their relationships to male characters.

"Either they're fighting over boys or chasing a boy or there's a boy they want," he says. The central players of Paper Girls "really don't care about boys at all — they care about making money and being independent and their friends."

It's also important to Chiang that readers see the story through each of their eyes, and the book will have equal focus on their various personalities.

"Brian mentioned to me that there's this idea that any time you get a group of four, you do break down into archetypes — that being basically the Beatles or the Ninja Turtles," the artist says with a laugh. "Along those rough lines, yeah, they do show their headband colors."

Vaughan was an up-and-coming writer in 2000 when he started penning Swamp Thing stories for Vertigo Comics and met Chiang, an assistant editor who worked on seminal titles such as Transmetropolitan and 100 Bullets. Chiang left Vertigo to become a freelance illustrator, and one of his first jobs was working with Vaughan on the Swamp Thing short story "Bitter Fruit."

It was an experience "that changed me as a writer for the next 15 years," and he's excited to watch Chiang's clean and thoughtful storytelling come alive again with Paper Girls, Vaughan says. "Even though they're beautiful and you could hang each of Cliff's pages up on the wall, when you're reading the story you don't think about it. You're just lost in this very real world."

The new series is Chiang's first work on a full-on creator-owned title, he says, and "it's a really great feeling to be creating a new story and bringing that out to people. I'm able to pour my heart into it."

Paper Girls also is the beginning of a slew of upcoming comics from Vaughan following his departure from an executive producer gig on CBS' Under the Dome TV series. While Saga is still his main priority, he envisions more stuff for Image Comics to come in 2015 as well as new things for Panel Syndicate, Vaughan's pay-what-you-want online site with artist Marcos Martin.

"This is when I just flood the market and people get incredibly sick of me this year," Vaughan quips. "It's really nice to be able to be back and just work on projects that are pure, unfettered imagination."