'Paper Girls' TV series based on Brian K. Vaughan comic gets green light at Amazon

While we continue to wait for that long-delayed serialized live-action adaptation of Y: The Last Man, we have another TV series based on a Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel to get excited about. 

Amazon Studios has officially greenlit a TV series based on the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel Paper Girls by Vaughan and artist Cliff Chiang from Legendary Television in association with Plan B. The studio is ordering a series after it offered a series commitment in July of last year as part of a bidding war for the project. 

Often compared to Stranger Things (despite being released a year before the Netflix series debuted), Paper Girls is set in 1988 and follows four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls (Erin, MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany) living in the fictional suburb of Stony Stream, Ohio. On the morning after Halloween of ’88, while working their regular paper route, the four girls land smack-dab in the middle of a war among time travelers. This kicks off a coming-of-age story that takes the bicycle-riding preteens on a life-changing time-traveling adventure.

Stephany Folsom, who wrote the pilot, will serve as co-showrunner along with Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. All three will serve as executive producers along with Vaughan and Chiang. The showrunners have said in a joint statement issued by the studios that they’re all “huge fans of what Brian and Cliff created in Paper Girls” and that they hope “to do justice to the source material” with their small screen adaptation. 

The comic series has earned multiple Eisner Awards. In 2016, Paper Girls won two for Best New Series and Best Penciller/Inker. The following year, Wilson and Vaughan both won for Best Colorist and Best Writer respectively, due in part to their work on the series. Meanwhile, the series’ first compilation was shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2017.

“We love bringing Paper Girls to our global Amazon Prime Video audience as an original series,” said Albert Cheng, COO and Co-Head of Television at Amazon Studios in a statement. “Brian’s beloved, widely acclaimed and multiple Eisner Award-winning story delivers a gripping concept grounded by compelling characters."