Start with Paper girls, Vol. 1 and read the six collected volumes in number order. That is the whole answer. Paper Girls ran thirty issues between 2015 and 2019, it is finished, and it has no spin-offs, no crossovers and no companion series. The trades collect the issues in sequence, so publication order, story order and the only available order are all the same thing.
That is worth stating plainly, because a time-travel comic is exactly the kind of book readers expect to need a chart for. This one does not. The characters move between 1988, 2016, the far future and the Cretaceous, but you follow the four girls, and they experience events in the order the issues print them. There is no chronological alternative to argue about, and nobody who reads it straight through misses anything.
The six volumes
Paper girls, Vol. 1 collects issues one to five: four twelve-year-old newspaper deliverers out on the morning after Hallowe'en 1988 in suburban Cleveland, and the point at which their town stops behaving normally. Paper Girls, Vol. 2 takes them to 2016, and is where the premise stops being a mystery box and starts being about who these girls turn into. Paper Girls, Vol. 3 is the prehistoric detour, and the stretch where Cliff Chiang's line and Matt Wilson's colour are carrying as much of the story as the script.
Paper Girls, Vol. 4 goes to the far future and commits to an actual explanation of the war the girls have been caught inside, rather than deferring it further. Paper Girls, Vol. 5 converges the timelines. Paper Girls, Vol. 6 is issues twenty-six to thirty and the ending; read it in one sitting if you can, because the last chapter reframes the series as being about one 1988 morning rather than about time travel. Our catalogue credits Cliff Chiang first on volume five, which is a quirk of the record rather than a change of team — Brian K. Vaughan wrote all thirty issues and Chiang drew all thirty.
The one real trap: which edition line
The only way to get confused here is to mix editions. The same thirty issues exist as six trade paperbacks, as two deluxe hardcovers, and as a single compendium, and the numbering does not correspond between them — Paper Girls Deluxe Edition Book One is not the same span of story as volume one. Pick one line, buy inside it, and you will never have to think about it again. The trades are the cheapest way in and the format this list uses.
Where to go next
The genuine question a Paper Girls reader is left with is what else Vaughan wrote, and the answer depends on what held you. Y The Last Man, Vol. 1 opens sixty issues of a small group crossing a broken world — the long version of what Paper Girls does quickly, and the obvious next read. Runaways, Vol. 1 is his first major book and the closest in feel: teenagers discovering the adult world is not what it claims.
Saga, Vol. 1 is what he is best known for, running alongside Paper Girls with Fiona Staples; our cleanest record for it is a library-binding edition, so the display title carries a binding note, but the contents are the standard first collection. Ex Machina is catalogued here under the bare title and is the most political thing he has written, about a superhero who becomes mayor of New York. Pride of Baghdad is a single hardcover about four lions loose in Baghdad in 2003 — the shortest thing on the list and a demonstration of what he does with an ending when he has only one book to do it in. The private eye is a landscape-format future with no internet, and formally the most interesting item in his catalogue. We Stand on Guard Deluxe Edition collects the whole six-issue series in one volume, so there is no numbering trap; it is a blunt war comic and the least like Paper Girls, which is why it belongs last.
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Follow the full ordered path here: Paper Girls Reading Order: Where to Start and What Order to Read It In.
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