Paper Girls (Amazon Prime Video) is a good if unseasonal yarn. This adaptation of Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic-book series begins on 1 November 1988, the day after Halloween and a date known to the locals of Stony Stream – a fictional suburb of Cleveland – as Hell Day. At half four in the morning, when our protagonists are getting up for their paper rounds, they are less worried about the spirits who have only just fled back from whence they came than the masked and drunken louts who have not yet gone home. It is 12-year-old Chinese-American Erin’s (Riley Lai Nelet) first time out. When she is confronted with an enraged and racist customer, belligerent tomboy Mac (Sofia Rosinsky, giving off a huge Edward-Furlong-in-Terminator-2 vibe) comes to her rescue and quickly introduces her to the rest of the delivery gang: KJ Brandman (Fina Strazza), whose family name is on most of the public buildings in town, and Tiffany Quilkin (Camryn Jones), who is very into gadgets. It is Tiffany who supplies the walkie-talkies that enable them to split up and stay in touch – until one is stolen by a mysterious disfigured man. As they give chase, the sky turns purple, lights go on the fritz, voices speaking in a strange language start coming through the remaining radio –and Mac grabs her dad’s gun for self-defence and accidentally shoots Erin in the stomach. Then they are grabbed by more mysterious strangers and taken into a steampunky craft that deposits them in a forest … in 2019. People in metallic costumes wielding laser guns stalk the wood (bad) and a swarm of robotic hornets heal Erin’s wound (good). One of the steampunky craft’s crew hands Tiff a battered device to protect before he is killed, and the girls escape to Erin’s house. There they meet Erin, aged 43 and very perturbed to be confronted with her pre-pubescent self. The girls have become embroiled in a time-war. The metallic soldiers – The Watch – are on one side, trying to preserve the timeline in which time-travel is outlawed and they stay in power. The steampunky people are the resistance. There is more, but that’s the basic premise. It is tremendous fun. It has great Stranger Things energy (or should that be The Goonies and Stand By Me meta-energy?) but everything feels fresh. Partly because of the all-female gang, still such a rarity, and the sense of genuine sorority among them. They band together first in the face of men’s aggression, and this awareness of the common dangers that connect them, even when they differ superficially and challenge each other, gives the whole thing an unusually firm grounding. At its best, it even edges towards Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s unspoken omnipresent feminism. There are moments when you wonder whether it might have worked even better tweaked for a younger audience (the language being toned down, for instance), who would identify more directly with the excellent young cast. But this may fade as the quartet fan out further into the future, meeting their older selves and relatives, and the great questions of fate and free assert themselves. As it stands, it’s all good for what ails you, whatever age you are.