Read This: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

NOTE: Very little of Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together makes it into the movie, and what does turn up does so in a highly altered/condensed form.

Which is a bit of a shame, really, because this installment of the story puts Scott Pilgrim’s love for Ramona to a test more real and more serious than the battles with the seven evil exes—the return of his best friend from high school, the girl he never dated but maybe could’ve/maybe should’ve. Also, he’s working on proving to Ramona that he’s not a slacker by getting a job… which turns out to be way too easy, something we could say about a lot of Scott’s life. The other aspect of this book that is most unfortunately lost from the movie is the nuance of Scott’s friendship with Kim (seen above)—that also goes back to high school (as we saw back in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). Events in this book make it clear that the urban fantasy elements framing Scott and Ramona’s relationship are “real” enough that Kim can experience them, too—so this isn’t all just in Scott’s head.

It started building up in Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, but this is the point where it becomes so clear Bryan Lee O’Malley is using shonen manga and video game metaphors to tell a very serious story about emotional maturity. One of my favorite bloggers, Chris Sims, wrote a fascinating essay last week about why making the Archie gang grownups doesn’t work: “If you make him the typical aimless twentysomething, his relatable problems suddenly aren’t that funny.” And that may be true of the Archie characters because of the decades of accumulated cultural relevance they’ve acquired, but Scott Pilgrim and his friends don’t have that restraint; we’re getting to know them for the first time, so while it may be disconcerting to have the comic veer from “Big Battle as metaphor for relationship issues” to “serious conversations about relationship issues,” it’s a narrative bait-and-switch that totally works.

17 August 2010 | read this |

Read This: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness

The final pages of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World set Scott up for his fight with Todd Ingram, the third “evil ex” Scott needs to defeat before he can become Ramona’s girlfriend, and that battle takes up most of Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness. That’s not all there is to this book, though: Bryan Lee O’Malley breaks up the fighting into several distinct stages, but he also weaves in an extended flashback that charts Scott’s previous relationship—the one he’d been moping about back when the story began—and brings a new layer of emotional depth to our hero. This is the point at which that level of storytelling seems to engage O’Malley more and more; yes, he still brings the awesome fight scenes with the shonen manga layouts (including, as always, some fab double-page spreads), but the “real world” is asserting itself in ways that will prove significant as the story continues to progress.

During one of the “serious conversations” leading up to the big battle, there’s a major clue that Scott’s video-game universe may not be as “real” (within the context of the story) as it seems—which might be at odds with the urban fantasy elements of Ramona’s life that are clearly intended to be “real,” not to mention Todd Ingram’s vegan psychic powers (which make him the deadliest of Scott’s foes yet). But we’ll get back to that…

16 August 2010 | read this |