Imaginary Worlds - Paper Girls on Bikes

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

When the artist Cliff Chiang co-created the comic book series Paper Girls, about four suburban kids in the ‘80s who get caught up in forces that can break space and time, he thought they’d come up with something totally original. But soon after the comic book came out, Stranger Things debuted on Netflix. Both creative projects are part of a genre that’s more popular than ever: Kids on Bikes. I talk with Cliff about why he wanted Paper Girls to stand out from other Kids on Bikes stories. Screenwriter Stephany Folsom discusses how she adapted Paper Girls into an Amazon Prime Video live-action show by pitching it as “anti-nostalgia.” I also talk with game designers Jon Gilmour and Doug Levandowski about how they distilled the elements of Kids on Bikes stories into a role-playing game, and whether the genre is ready to outgrow its 1980s setting. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In 2015, I interviewed Cliff Chang for an episode about Wonder Woman. Cliff is one of my favorite comic book artists. He draws with simple, heavy graphic lines that convey a lot of emotion. And every panel is perfectly framed to express whatever story he's telling. and every panel is perfectly framed to express whatever story he's telling. I interviewed him at his studio, and after we were done, I was packing up my recording equipment, and he showed me artwork that he was working on for a new series called Paper Girls. The image was four girls on bikes in the suburbs.

They were wearing 80s clothes, and the sky looked menacing above them, hinting there was something large and powerful out there. I was instantly hooked. Yeah, I remember showing you what we had. Yeah, the issue hadn't come out yet, but, you know, I did have the first issue of inked artwork in the studio, and it's amazing to think, you know, how many years ago that was. Paper Girls ran for 30 issues until the story wrapped up in 2019. Not long after that, Amazon Prime bought the rights for a live-action TV adaptation. And the show just debuted. Cliff and his writing partner Brian K. Vaughn are executive producers. Maybe everybody has already been evacuated.

That's standard procedure when there's a nuclear attack. No, there's a nuclear attack. You think it could be aliens? I'm just saying we don't know. Where's my walkie? But before that could happen, way back in the summer of 2016, when the seventh issue of Paper Girls had just hit comic book stores, a new science fiction show appeared on Netflix that had quite a few similarities to Paper Girls.

You know, I was laughing with Brian because, you know, we thought we were doing something that was out of left field. You know, we've made our peace with it for sure. I think if you watch the show and if you watch Stranger Things, they're very different shows with very different creative goals. One of the differences is that Stranger Things taps into the horror genre, while Paper Girls is more traditionally sci-fi. The girls are jumping around in time from futuristic cities with flying cars to prehistoric times and fighting off giant creatures. And they're caught up in a war between these two

different time-traveling factions. The main thing that Paper Girls and Stranger Things have in common is that they both feature kids on bikes. In fact, there's a growing recognition among cultural critics that kids on bikes has become a genre. E.T. is the classic kids on bike story, but there's also the Goonies, Stand By Me, Lost Boys, to name just a few that were made in the 80s. And then there are the ones that are set in the 80s,

like, of course, Stranger Things, but also Stephen King's It, Super 8, and even the German show Dark, which has kids on bikes going back to the 80s and beyond. I think it's so interesting that this thing, which started out organically, without many people noticing, has become a self-aware

genre. And I wanted to know, why do so many of these stories about kids on bikes involve supernatural elements? And how come kids on bike stories that are set in the 80s are popular with kids today who didn't grow up in that time? Before we get to that, let's go back to Paper Girls, because it stands out from a lot of the other Kids on Bikes stories in interesting ways. Cliff Chang did not come up with the idea originally. It was pitched to him by his friend, Brian K. Vaughn, who is best known for writing comics like Saga and Why the Last Man. Cliff loved the idea right away, but as an artist... I was nervous about it. I can't ride a bicycle. You know, it's one of those

things. It's like, write what you know. And sometimes you just want to draw what you know. I can't, I can't ride a bike, you know, and drawing kids for issue after issue. You know, these are things that are notoriously difficult for artists. You know, I wasn't sure if I was up to the challenge. At the same time, I knew because of the time period that unless you lived it, it could really easily become a punchline. The other thing that made him want to do the comic was that the protagonists were all girls. You immediately bring in this kind of scrappier outsider status to your heroes. You know, the idea of 12-year-old paper girls, you know, having to hustle down their customers for, you subscriptions, talking to adults, waking up at 4 a.m.

That's immediately a much more independent kind of kid. I didn't have a job when I was 12. But to make the story about girls, you start to move away from these stories where young boys have to learn how to be men, you know, and there's a kind of a learned toxic masculinity that's encoded in a lot of that kind of fiction. Adding to their outsider status, one of the characters is Asian, one of them is Black, and two of the four girls discover that they're gay. characters is Asian, one of them is black, and two of the four girls discover that they're gay. And in developing the series, Cliff had another idea. What if in jumping around through time,

the girls meet future versions of themselves? His creative partner, Brian, loved the idea, and that became the heart of the story. The kids and their adult selves feel such a wide range of emotions when they meet each other, from disappointment to exasperation to compassion. When I think back to when I was 12, it's fairly innocent and very directionless, which is okay. But you do naturally wonder if you did all right by that kid, you know, that kid who's so full of potential and innocent and, you know, and all the things that have gone, that have happened in between, you know, you wonder if you held on, how much you held on to that person and how much, what you might look like to them. In drawing the older version of the main character, Aaron, Cliff decided to model the adult Aaron after his wife. Using my wife was the best way for me to approach that character with as much love. And,

you know, I wanted her to feel believable and I wanted to, you know, and the best way for me to do that was to, yeah, kind of put as much of myself in it as possible. Did you have anything to do with the casting of the show on Amazon? Because when I saw pictures of the four girls, like just their headshots, like not even in period costumes, I actually said to myself like, oh my God, because it looked exactly like your drawings. I was amazed to see the casting. We were not involved with it at all,

but they sent us the final reels for the girls, and we were just awestruck by how well they inhabited those roles. They look like them, and they sound like them. Which is impressive because it's a comic book. So when they spoke, they sounded like the voices that he imagined in his head. Stephanie Folsom is a TV and film writer in Los Angeles, and she developed the Paper Girls streaming show on Amazon. Cliff and Brian were concerned about the fact

that there were two men telling a story about girls, so they wanted to make sure that whoever developed the show could relate more personally to the characters, and Stephanie definitely did. My generation never got a coming-of-age story. It was always having to graft my experience onto a boy experience. Because I feel like most of the stories I got were about girls having makeovers in order to get the first date or to be allowed to the party.

So if you wanted to just have an adventure and have fun and explore and be a hero, you had to go to like the boys' stories, you know? Like you had to, you know, stand by me, Goonies. Like these kind of things were the stories that like I was like, yes, I can relate to that, but there's no one that looks like me. The first season just came out, and it doesn't have the giant scope of the comics, which would have required a Star Wars-sized special effects budget. Instead,

the show embraces its smaller scale by focusing in on and expanding the relationship between the girls and between their older selves. So a lot of effort was put into casting the show. selves. So a lot of effort was put into casting the show. Oh, it was insane. Our poor casting people. They did a nationwide search, even international search. They went through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of candidates. We saw, you know, professional actors. We saw kids who had done one commercial, kids who had done nothing. Every day it was like they had to go through like 300 to 500 casting tapes to find those girls. It was pretty insane. Wow. Did you find all four of them?

Was it a similar journey for all four of them or any of them harder to cast than others? You know, I think that the role of Erin was hard because Erin, you know, has to speak fluent Mandarin. Like she comes from, you know, an immigrant family, you know, and that's how she communicates with her mom. And so like finding a young woman who had the acting chops and was fluent in Mandarin and could do it was no easy task. They found the perfect Erin. She's a young actress named Riley Lai Nillette. The adult version of Erin is played by Ali Wong. And Ali was a huge fan of the comics, you know, and I get it. Like Ali just gets like straight offers. And we actually made her audition because we wanted to see how she interacted with the younger version of herself.

And to make sure that she was viable as like adult Riley, essentially. She killed it. Her audition was absolutely amazing. And just after like watching her interact with Riley, you're like, yeah, they're completely the same person. I completely bought, we all completely bought that Ali Wong was Riley after seeing them just interact with each other. What is your job?

I work in the court system. A lawyer? Paralegal. Yes, a paralegal. What do you want me to say? I don't even remember what I wanted to be when I was your age. A U.S. senator and a mother of four. Wow.

Well, as you can see, that did not transpire. Paper Girls is often compared to Stranger Things because they both have kids from the 80s. But Stranger Things, even though it's dark in terms of all the horror elements, tends to treat the 80s like the good old days with leg warmers and fun pop songs. Paper Girls takes a darker approach to the 80s.

Again, here's Cliff. I think it's important to show that stuff because it also shows what kind of progress has been made. To be reminded of how baldly people would announce their homophobia and use slurs, you know, there wasn't even necessarily coded language for a lot of the races. And then, too, you know, it was a different time. And we wanted to show that.

You can't really say that stuff. It's not it's not OK. OK, I don't even want to go in here. What else? Get out of my case. Really? How I'm the rich girl with the banks and the champagne. What's the big deal?

Explain to me what is the big deal? Have you ever heard of the Holocaust? Oh, give me a break. Ask my grandmother about it sometime. I'm sure she really enjoyed it. This isn't Nazi Germany. And yet someone wrote Jew bitch on my locker last year. The whole pitch and the whole idea behind it was that Paper Girls has something that Stranger Things doesn't, which is its anti-nostalgia.

The more you go back in time, the less rights you have and less freedom you have. So it kind of doesn't take like a cherry, like, wouldn't it be great to go back in time? It's a little bit more like, oh God, what if I had to go back in time? What would that be? I think we view the 80s kind of through the Steven Spielberg lens. And I love Spielberg. So go ahead and view it through that lens all you want. But if you look at the real 80s, there were huge issues. There were civil rights issues going on. There were gender equality issues going on. And besides that, like you had big world issues.

You had the Cold War crisis. I mean, nuclear war was an actual real threat, just as it is today, which is kind of crazy that we're back in that place. Kids had to deal with a lot. Also, kids were left on their own to figure things out. And even though the main characters leave the 1980s early on in the story, the girls that are queer were raised in a culture that was openly homophobic. Showing where gay rights has been and where it's going and where it's come from and how easy it is to maybe slip back into where it's been, I think is important. And I think it's going and where it's come from and how easy it is to maybe slip back into

where it's been, I think is important. And I think it's important we know the history and the fact that such derogatory terms were just thrown around in like everyday use and nobody blinked at it. You know, people don't think of that. And that's not that long ago. And I think it's important to remember that. And also just how brave kids of that era were that came out. Because it wasn't, and it's still brave coming out, I think, in a lot of places in the world. But, you know, it's not accepted. And it's real life and death stakes. Whether a story about the 80s is nostalgic or not,

I don't think kids on bikes stories that are told today are really about the past. There's a reason why kids on bikes evolved from a plot device to a genre. We'll keep running up that hill after the break. To be continued... Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two refreshing flavors, Blackberry Yuzu and Mango Starfruit. Try them today, only at Tim's.

At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. In trying to explore why kids on bikes became a genre, I wanted to talk with two guys who have given this a lot of thought, John Gilmore and Doug Lewandowski. They created a role-playing game called Kids on Bikes. I just started playing the game recently with a small group, and it's fun. Early on, we could decide whether the tone of our game was dark or light.

I wanted our town to be David Lynchian, so it feels more like Blue Velvet than Stranger Things. And John told me that after he and Doug created the game, it still went through a lot of changes after they playtested it. The thing we found immediately in our playtesting was that people adored the world creation and we really worked hard after those early playtests to make that part of the game shine because the more that they enjoyed building the world the more they enjoyed playing in it. Before you start playing the players also have to answer questions like what is the industry your town is known for? Is it still in business? What's your most famous landmark? What's the name of town is known for? Is it still in business? What's your most famous landmark?

What's the name of your high school team? I think my favorite question, and the one that really made it come to life, was asking each player what one of the rumors that they've heard about the town is. It's super fun because people are so creative. And a lot of people will take a rumor about the town they grew up in and incorporate it into the story. And it really personalizes it in a fun way. When our group started playing, I suggested the idea that the town has secret passages from the Underground Railroad. That's a rumor I used to hear about the very old houses in the Boston suburb that I grew up in.

Also, you can choose a character to play from very recognizable archetypes. Like Adventurous Scout, Conspiracy Theorist, Brilliant Mathlete, Prom Royalty, Mysterious Transfer, Freakazoid, Silver Spoon, Goody Goody, or Seasoned Babysitter. The character that I came up with is a goth kid who's secretly a nerd. The guy playing my brother decided to go in the opposite direction. He's the star of the football team. But in creating the game, one of the archetypes really stumped John and Doug. Doug and I went back and forth a lot about including the bully as a trope. And he's like, well know we don't necessarily want to

glorify violence but i was like yeah but think about those stories where like in goonies you know the older brother that picks on him all the time has this really nice redemption arc where you know he becomes better and you know becomes a goonie himself and i was like i think if we if we remove that you remove those kind of stories. Doug Lewandowski told me that conversation he had with John about the bully made him think about how they should handle violence in the game mechanics. One of the key things that we did in Kids on Bikes is how vulnerable the characters are. how vulnerable the characters are. Nobody should walk away like,

okay, we tackled each other into an empty pool and got our leg ripped off by the werewolf, but we're fine tomorrow. That vulnerability and that reliance on the luck of the role, I think is a good way to represent that fragility that comes along with the genre. The threat of violence or physical danger is a big part of the kids on bike genre, because growing up often means not having adults around to protect you.

So I think it's this idea that the kids are on their own in some way, either because the adults aren't there or don't believe them. And I think a lot of it is this tension between the smaller settings that are usually there and forces coming in from the outside. In E.T., you see that in terms of the good force coming in from the outside E.T. versus the government force coming in that wants to control him and all that sort of stuff. In Goonies, you see this tension of this one kid who's about to move away and sort of moving out into the outside world, but also then the criminals coming into this place that's been there all along. On some level, bikes are just practical. If the kids are too young to get their licenses, then they need bikes to get around. But being on a bike also raises the stakes. There's just an added level of vulnerability that comes along with being on a bike that you're exposed.

If somebody swings a bat at you and you're in a car, it might break the window, but you're going to drive away. If somebody swings a bat at you on the bike, you're in a world of hurt. Or if a monster shoots some projectile monster thing at you. Yeah, exactly. Why do you think that so many kids on bike stories have monsters in them? I think they're a great metaphor. I think the one that does

this most overtly is Super 8, which has this alien that represents this loneliness and this isolation that the main character is feeling after the death of his mother. I know bad things happen. But you can still live. You know, there's that great scene where he is eye to eye with the monster and has that talk with it about how

just because some people are bad and bad things happen doesn't mean everybody's bad. But I think those monsters serve as these really great ways to show a facet of this problem or this tension. The tension being? The tension being the, depending on the movie, but whatever force is pushing them to grow up or change or not grow up or not change. Another question I had is whether kids on bike stories need to be set in the past. Even though the Paper Girls jumped from the 1980s to the present, Stephanie Folsom thinks it was important that the girls came from a time period when they weren't used to having smartphones.

This is going to sound weird at first, but I almost feel like it kind of taps in the same idea that like a road movie kind of taps into, whereas kind of this idea of freedom of the open road and being able to choose your own way and kind of being a master of your world in that moment and also being like very clear on like who your identity is and who you are in that moment. The second you insert like the smartphone into a story like that, then I think the idea of freedom and the wind in your hair

and you don't have to answer to anybody suddenly goes away. So do you think the fact that these are this genre now is still really popular? Do you think there's a kind of nostalgia for that? Like some people, even kids today watching these shows set way back when they still think there's kind of like a fantasy in being able to do that when you can't anymore? Oh, I definitely think so. I think that there's something and I also think there's probably a curiosity factor. Because I don't know, I'm kind of from like the generation that grew up with like, come home before the streets come on. And then I was there for the transition

with like, you're being monitored all the time, you know, and I, I think that if I hadn't had that exposure for that brief moment in time of being like, you can do anything until the streetlights come on, I think it would just seem like, I'd be curious about like what that was like, because it would just seem so different than like my current reality. I asked John and Doug about this. John agreed with Stephanie. He thinks it's hard to tell these types of stories today.

But Doug disagrees. He mentioned two Kids on Bikes movies that were not set in the past. They were also not set in the suburbs. There was a 2011 film called Attack the Block, where teenagers in South London fought off aliens. And then there's a film from 2020 called Vampires vs. the Bronx. And then there's a film from 2020 called Vampires vs. the Bronx. The good guys are black kids from the Bronx versus these pale white vampires who want to come in and gentrify their neighborhood. Talk about updating for modern anxieties. I thought it was just spot on. What's poppin' y'all? It's your girl Gloria coming at you live.

If you see a kid that's riding a bike two sizes too big for him, that's his little man trying to save the neighborhood. And speaking of saving the neighborhood, what's up with all these missing person flyers? I think the more advanced technology gets, the easier it'll be to tell one of those stories. You know, like five years ago, if I saw something and whipped out my camera phone and took a recording of it and posted it online, people would go, oh my God, that's that thing.

Whereas now people would look at it and say, oh, it's a deep fake. He, you know, I'm not sure what the video equivalent of Photoshop is, but, you know, did that for this vampire who's attacking this person or or whatever. So so the idea that kids are often not believed would actually could potentially even be stronger in this day and age. Right. Oh, those kids, they can stage this in some way. You know, they did cool graphic effects. Kids are so good with technology. Of course, it's that. I think in some ways, as the younger generation gets more and more frustrated with adult inaction on serious issues, the more we're going to see kids on bikes, sorts of stories that talk about climate change, that talk about gun violence, that talk about things like that in new ways, in ways that create

a metaphor for their concerns, their anxieties around that. Especially when adults are trying to gaslight kids into believing that these dangerous problems aren't a big deal or they can't be solved. into believing that these dangerous problems aren't a big deal or they can't be solved. But if you can imagine yourself defeating evil time travelers, or a demigorgon or mind flayer with just your bikes and whatever else you have at hand, why not take on the real monsters that are closer to home? That is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Cliff Chang, Stephanie Folsom, John Gilmore, and Doug Lewandowski. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. By the way, the fall semester of my NYU class, Creating a Narrative Podcast, starts on Tuesday, September 6th. It's an eight-week course and it's virtual. You can learn more at NYU's School of Professional Studies website. If you really like Imaginary Worlds, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media. It always helps people discover the show. And if you'd like to advertise on Imaginary Worlds, let us know at contact

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