I don’t usually buy single issues of comics (I much prefer TPBs), but I backed Paradox Girl on Kickstarter because it looked like a lot of fun, and I wanted to support its creators. It delivered on time, and I finished reading all three issues over the weekend. It’s every bit as fun as I’d hoped it’d be.
Written by Cayti Elle Bourquin and illustrated by Yishan Li, Paradox Girl is a time travel comic about the titular Paradox Girl, whose superpower is instantaneous, at-will time travel which doesn’t violate causality. That means that she’s essentially an “infinite being”, because copies of her are all over space and time, doing stuff — often stuff that helps her sleep in, acquire her favorite snacks, or fix problems other version of her have caused.
The 1987 Waffos loop
One of my favorite bits in Paradox Girl is the kickoff to the first issue: PG’s endless loop to ensure that she always has a box of Waffos, a toaster waffle product that hasn’t been made since 1987.
As they put it on the PG website:
You’re infinite, so while there might be 4 of you somewhere saving children from a burning school, there’s probably 800 more of you arguing about why you set the school on fire in the first place.
There are no temporal consequences for PG’s time travel, so versions of her do all sorts of things on a whim, constantly. It’s gloriously chaotic.
Binkiesaurus vs. laser-emu
The first three issues are self-contained stories, each built around a core of problems caused — usually unintentionally — by PG herself, or by PG reacting to a problem someone else caused.
When PG wants to get rid of an angry wolverine in issue #2, she pops into points on the timeline where increasingly improbably creatures can be found, and sics them on the wolverine — and each other.
On this page, she’s “summoned” a binkie-sucking dinosaur to battle the cyborg emu she summoned to . . . you get the idea.
I’ve been jamming on time travel lately, and Paradox Girl scratches an itch unlike any of the other stuff I’ve been reading.
It takes nothing seriously, especially PG herself, but it also delivers solid time travel stories that have me flipping back and forth to see where loops began, to suss things out, and to smile at how everything comes together. It’s a light-hearted delight.