11 Years Later, This Six-Part Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is Still Everything Stranger Things Should Have Been

Published Sep 19, 2026, 10:00 PM EDT

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Stranger Things had pretty much everything needed to become the ultimate sci-fi adventure. Kids on bikes, creepy monsters, secret experiments, '80s nostalgia, and a town where something insane was always happening. For a while, Netflix absolutely nailed it, which is why the show eventually became Netflix's most-watched show of all time. But somewhere along the way, the show got so obsessed with making everything bigger that the fun started getting buried under longer episodes, endless fake-out deaths, and a story that seemed increasingly afraid to actually hurt its characters.

Ironically, one of the best versions of that same idea is a comic that came out years before Stranger Things ever existed. Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls starts with four kids doing something about as '80s as it gets: delivering newspapers on Halloween morning. Then the sky gets weird, the neighborhood turns into a war zone, and suddenly these girls are caught in the middle of a time-traveling war involving their own future. Eleven years later, this six-volume sci-fi masterpiece still feels like everything Stranger Things should have been.

That's only the beginning. Over 30 issues, Paper Girls goes from suburban sci-fi mystery to dinosaurs, giant robots, alternate futures, and some surprisingly emotional stuff about growing up and becoming the person the younger version never expected. Prime Video's 2022 adaptation lasted just one season, but the comic never had that problem. It knows exactly where the story is going, keeps throwing genuinely wild ideas at the reader, and most importantly, actually knows when to stop.

Paper Girls Mastered The '80s Sci-Fi Nostalgia Even Before Hawkins Even Existed

The timing alone makes Paper Girls pretty wild. Image Comics launched the series in October 2015, almost a year before Stranger Things hit Netflix and turned the “kids on bikes” formula into a global obsession. Paper Girls even opens with that same kind of '80s nostalgia, dropping four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls into the early morning of November 1, 1988, or what the comic calls “Hell Day.” But that's about where the similarities start going completely off the rails.

The group dynamics even mirror the Hawkins crew perfectly. Erin has that same natural leader thing that makes Mike so important to the Hawkins crew, Tiffany is the gadget-loving nerd who feels closest to Dustin, and Mac has the angry, rebellious attitude that Max would later bring to Stranger Things.

But that's basically where the easy comparisons end. Instead of slowly getting dragged into a monster mystery, the girls stumble straight into the middle of a massive time war. That's where Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang really go crazy with the concept. Paper Girls isn't trying to be another monster-hunting horror story. Its time travel actually changes the characters.

The “Battle of the Ages” throws the girls between the Old-Timers, the first humans to discover time travel, and their descendants from the 71st century. And suddenly Paper Girls is throwing giant tardigrades, dinosaurs, futuristic weapons, and bizarre future tech at four kids who were literally just delivering newspapers. If Stranger Things has the Upside Down, Paper Girls has a freaking dinosaur showing up in 1988. That's the kind of sci-fi chaos the comic is working with.

The Definitive Ending Of Paper Girls Highlights Exactly Where Stranger Things Went Wrong

The biggest reason the comparison still works is that Paper Girls takes almost every part of the Stranger Things formula and pushes it somewhere more interesting. The kids on bikes are there. The '80s setting is there. Weird creatures, secretive groups, and impossible sci-fi are all there too. But instead of keeping the characters trapped in one mystery and finding a new monster whenever the story needs one, Paper Girls keeps changing what the whole adventure is about.

That's especially clear with the girls themselves. Stranger Things started with kids who felt like actual kids, but the later story kept turning them into soldiers fighting increasingly massive threats. Paper Girls never forgets how young its characters are. The girls can be brave one minute and completely overwhelmed the next. Meeting their future selves makes that even better, because suddenly the biggest question isn't whether they can defeat some monster. It's whether they even like the people they're going to become.

That's the version of Stranger Things that Paper Girls feels like it could have been. Same basic ingredients, but less interest in making everything bigger and more interest in what all that weirdness does to the characters. Vaughan and Chiang got 30 issues to tell the whole story, used every one of them, and then stopped. Eleven years later, the comic still feels like a reminder that a great sci-fi adventure doesn't need to keep getting bigger. It just needs to keep getting better.

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  Sofia Rosinsky

Based on the sci-fi comic series, Paper Girls follows four girls with a paper route who find themselves one fateful Halloween smack dab in the middle of an interdimensional conflict that sends them through time and space. The girls discover their future selves and encounter various future-altering events that they must decide to either attempt to intervene or let the scenarios play out as they were intended.