Time travel can be incredibly hard to get your mind around for storytelling — but Paradox Girl is a comic that manages to use the most daunting elements of time travel, all the complex loops and non-linearity, in some of the smartest and funnest ways we’ve ever seen. It makes for one hell of a comic.
Written by Cayti Borquin and with art by Yishan Li, Paradox Girl follows the adventures of the titular heroine as she fights crime with her best pal Axiom Man, and gets through life with the amazing power to instantly travel through time and space, happily co-existing with different copies of herself from different times. Sometimes those different copies help her save the day from giant monsters… sometimes they help her get her favourite brand of waffles that were last on shelves in the ’80s. Paradox Girl has to deal with bickering with her copied selves as she bumbles through her adventures, as well as with the fact that her time travel abilities have basically caused her to forget her real past and origins.
Not everything in Paradox Girl is told in a straightforward manner, as various copies of Paradox Girl fly out through the pages to be present exactly where they need to be. Through the many twists and turns, we see each layer of Paradox Girl’s time travel shenanigans form the wider story. Take a look at the first issue of the series, recently hosted on Imgur by the creators, and see just how well Paradox Girl handles its non-linear concepts in a really fun, yet clever way.
The first three issues of Paradox Girl first released after a successful Kickstarter earlier this year, and the next three are currently being funded by a new Kickstarter, due to end this Monday, December 12.
It’s already reached its goal, but if you want to check out the Kickstarter and grab the other issues ahead of their release in January next year, you can check it out at the link below.
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3 responses to “Paradox Girl Is One Of The Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year”
If she’s really a time traveler (particularly one who can ignore paradox) there’s no reason her waffles should ever have stopped being made. All she’d have to do is go back and use future knowledge to make money (either through the “Biff Tannen” method or just by investing in IBM or Apple or something), use the profits to buy the waffle company and then force them to keep making them.
This is why time travel stories rarely work; either it’s the ultimate weapon, able to do anything, or it’s bound by annoying and implausible rules that are unsatifying for the audience.
meh most super powers are implausible and bound by other implausible rules
I get where you’re coming from, but in this case the protagonist is clearly too short-sighted and petty to consider a long-term solution to any of her problems, even though she is better equipped than anybody else to deal with it. It’s not that she can’t go back in time and manipulate the breakfast snack market, it’s that she can’t be bothered when she can just grab a box from a shelf in the 80’s. Have a read through the free chapter to see what I mean. It’s not the most satisfying abuse of time travel I’ve read, but hey, she wouldn’t be the first superhero who isn’t dedicated or serious enough to get the most out of her powers.
One Of The Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year
beating out others such as….um….half a mo…..mmmm….Back to the Future?