Paper Girls #5 takes the reader all ever the place. The juvenile cyborg chrononauts communicate largely with one another, but the story finds an opportunity for some untranslated text. The first letter to appear initially in an entirely fictional word is Q, and we’ve dutifully added it to our decoder.
SPOILER WARNING!
Every month it feels like reading the logographic language gets a little easier. However this issue not only reveals some unusual terminology with the characters, we also get an entirely fictional word. For folks who’d prefer not to look up and substitute every letter, we’ve translated what Naldo and the Cronebergian Tardis are saying in “Now is Gone” below.
The Dinglehopper 
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February 4, 2016 at 10:36 pm
Tuplequad was breaking my brain last night as I was trying to use the decoder.
Thanks for putting this together. It really adds a lot to the story to be able to translate the future text. I also finally noticed after re-reading the series so far last night how the “titles” of 2-4 run into each other: Nostalgia is death, Death is Forever, Forever is now, Now is gone.
With the future teens dead with the end of this story arc, I wonder if this will continue or if the next arc will throw a new language at us to make everyone start over. That would be a wonderfully evil thing to do now that you have almost all the letters figured out.
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February 5, 2016 at 11:00 am
Thanks for this, Brian. I think you’re absolutely right that dropping the language altogether would be a wicked play from BKV. And I wouldn’t put it past him. By transitive property, then, is nostalgia gone? I’m wondering if it isn’t quite literally being harvested/stolen. But I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that.
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June 13, 2017 at 3:13 pm
This is cool! I am a little late to Paper Girls – and definitely hooked! I was thinking of creating panel-by-panel annotations… I am one of the creators of Alan Moore annotation websites https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com/ – I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes… and maybe want to put a team together… any thoughts?
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June 28, 2019 at 9:38 pm
This key was so helpful, thanks 🙂 I am reading the French translation, and I’ve found the symbol for Z ! I don’t know if this is useful to you 3 years later, but here is a link with some images from the french version. At the bottom is an example of where I found Z, and what it looks like.
https://imgur.com/a/myNzM5i
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