Paper Girls was a smashing success for Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, with the 30-issue series winning critical and commercial acclaim during its six-year run. The story, focusing on four paper girls from 1984 who find themselves shunted backward, forwards, and all over time and space, is now coming to live-action, courtesy of Amazon Prime. Vaughan and Chiang served as executive producers on the series and are quick to champion the new take on their material and the cast assembled to play Erin, Mac, Tiff, and KJ.
While visiting the CBR Media Room at San Diego Comic-Con 2022, Paper Girls creators Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, along with Chris Rogers, who serves as an executive producer on Amazon Prime's adaptation of the series, spoke about seeing the characters make the leap to live-action. The group also dove into the joys of witnessing the young characters find new shades thanks to the cast and their favorite elements of the adaptation.
CBR: Brian and Cliff, as the creators of the original series, what's it like to see these characters come to life thanks to these performers?
Brian K. Vaughan: It's so thrilling. It's one thing to get to see moments from the comic that are translated perfectly, as it was imagined, but it's much more exciting to see moments that Cliff and I had never imagined, or we didn't have the real estate [for]... We had just 30 monthly comics to do [this]. I think the excitement of seeing these four extraordinary performers... We just want to see them go to places that maybe we didn't get to go in the comic. So it's very cool to have a series that, if you loved it, you know captures the spirit [and] the tone perfectly, but it's not the kind of thing that you can just all go to Wikipedia and know exactly what's going to happen. There are still huge surprises, and that has just been tremendous.
Cliff Chiang: We tried with the characters to make as grounded a series as we could and make it feel as real and honest as we could, but you know, as older creators, that's something we kind of have to just rely on our own kind of sense of empathy. Then to see these actresses bring that to life and really sell it and make it a completely different thing... You see these girls going through the story, and you know that it feels really lived in. We love that about it. It's my favorite part of seeing the show.
Chris, how do you adapt a story like this and find the balance between the hard sci-fi of it all without losing touch of that vital human element?
Rogers: I think, in adapting this, we felt like the opportunity was to really kind of sit down more in the world. Brian and Cliff created the whole world. The story in the run of the comics takes place over very few days, but these huge conversations are implied in the scenarios of meeting your older self [and] confronting the chasm between who you thought you'd be and who you ended up being. So just to spend time in these moments that [were] pitch-perfect on the page but maybe kind of begged for deeper exploration... that was the opportunity.
So we kind of felt like we had to get the personal stuff right now to be able to counter punch that with time-travel with these giant epic battles, with this huge Casablanca-like conflict in the background. I mean, that just lets the show operate on a whole secondary level. So that was absolutely something we wanted to paint with, but it was more important to us, at least initially, to get the characters right because, without the characters, there's no Paper Girls.
What has surprised you all the most about seeing the characters in this new form?
Vaughan: I guess I was surprised at -- they just felt like Cliff Chiang drawings come to life. Which is not to say that they're two-dimensional [in] any way. Those Cliff drawings feel so lived in, so real that they're able to do that. Then I guess the way they interact is a real delight. We were usually, in our adventures, scattering the girls off to different paths. To watch all four of them together, you just feel the reality of four young people from very different backgrounds, very different lives. To watch people become friends, I think it's just one of the most rewarding things that fiction can do. So the reality that they do it and now, getting to hang out with them a little here at Comic-Con and get to see sort of the reality of it... I mean, maybe they're good liars, but [the cast] seem like really good friends in real life. That is endlessly entertaining and surprising to watch.
Paper Girls premieres July 29 on Prime Video.