1) Paper Girls
Brian K. Vaughan has been a fan-favorite writer for a long time. He’s not only worked on major Marvel and DC books like X-Men, Runaways, Swamp Thing and more, but he’s also created creator-owned books like Y: The Last Man and Saga that have become essential reading in their own right. For years he’s been one of the most important voices in comics, always staying one step ahead of the curve. And with Paper Girls, he’s done it again.
The is the comic world’s answer to Stranger Things. It’s chock-full of 1980s nostalgia while at the same time telling a sincere, sweet story about adolescence. It doesn’t have the budgetary limitations of a TV series, but that’s a major part of the appeal. It gets stranger than Stranger Things. It’s a classic ‘80s story about suburban kids stumbling across something very bizarre and getting involved in cosmic weirdness, but the specific brand of weirdness they find is of an epic scale that only Vaughan and Cliff Chiang could provide. It’s funny, dark, sincere, weird and literally timeless. A must read if we’ve ever seen one.