Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Book Club: Volume 1

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Welcome, everyone, to the Scott Pilgrim Book Club. For those who missed our earlier announcement, we’re revving up for Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (due out July 20) and the Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World movie (due out August 13) by discussing each volume of the series over the course of six weeks. This week, Techland’s Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan, Mike Williams, Evan Narcisse and Time.com’s Christine Lim are talking about volume 1, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, and we’d like you to join in–please comment below!

DOUGLAS: Looking at volume 1 almost six years after it appeared, it’s pretty fascinating to see how much O’Malley’s work has changed, and to notice the ways in which it hasn’t. From the very first page, it’s a huge leap over his previous book, Lost at Sea, but he’s still figuring out what he’s doing–the look of his characters is a little bit inconsistent even over the first few dozen pages. (Even the bit at the end of the book with the “studio audience” going “ooooh!” seems like more of a gag that would have appeared in Hopeless Savages when O’Malley was working on it.) At first, it just looks like he’s playing with manga tropes in the context of a Canadian relationship comedy. Actually, “relationship comedy” is one way to put it, but–without having seen volume 6 yet–I’m starting to suspect that Scott Pilgrim is actually what Stanley Cavell would call a “comedy of remarriage.

GRAEME: I came to Scott Pilgrim late – I think it was between the second and third books, but it may have been the third and fourth? – and so read the first two together, and it always surprises me when I re-read the first how unfinished the art seems, and how “unlike” the characters everyone looks. There’s a confidence in line that comes later that is missing this early, and as a result, it feels at times like someone else trying to do Bryan Lee O’Malley, if that makes sense. Visually, it all begins to fall into place as the book goes on, which is interesting; it’s as if Bryan suddenly realized at some point “Oh, THIS is what it’s meant to look like.” But still: Compare the way that Scott looks at the end of the book and the beginning – there’s a definite shift.

DOUGLAS: I think just about everybody came to Scott Pilgrim late (aside from Matthew Perpetua, who’s perpetually ahead of the curve). As Christopher Butcher (the real-life Wallace Wells!) has pointed out, the first volume wouldn’t have made Diamond’s current cutoff mark for distribution based on its original orders. I didn’t discover it until sometime after volume two came out, when enough people said “no really dude I seriously think you’d like this” that I finally sat down and read  it. And they were right, of course.

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I’m not sure at exactly what point O’Malley realized that grafting the tropes of old video games into a relationship-comedy comic book would be unbelievably hilarious and effective, but that’s the point when Precious Little Life really takes off, I think. “This really convenient subspace highway happens to go through your head” reads like a joke explanation for an earlier scene that was too good to let go of; maybe O’Malley planned the whole thing earlier, but that particular moment feels like a breakthrough one way or another. Certainly, the first couple of chapters don’t look like they’re the beginning of a book that’s going to end with the big Matthew Patel fight scene/dance number and the “Sweet! Coins!” moment.

The characters and dialogue, on the other hand, are there from the get-go: Kim Pine–that has to be her speaking the first line of the book, right?–Knives, and especially Wallace, who’s one of the great supporting characters in comics. (My first crack-up on this rereading was nine pages in: “You’re totally my bitch forever, Scott.”) Ramona’s a little bit of an idealized dream girl, but that’s also her job at this stage of the plot: to be somebody that Scott’s so in love with the idea of that he doesn’t pay enough attention to the actual person.

Other people have annotated the game references at length (any favorites, gamers?), but it’s probably worth calling attention to a couple of music references, besides the Stephen Stills/Young Neil gag:

Scott Pilgrim himself is named after a song by Plumtree–he can be seen wearing a Plumtree shirt (with their album Mass Teen Fainting namechecked on the back) both in this book and in the movie trailer (and the song’s going to be on the movie soundtrack).

Sex Bob-Omb: Thanks to my post-2600 game illiteracy, I totally didn’t get that this was a videogame joke. For years. The part of the joke I got was the reference to Flipper’s American punk classic “Sex Bomb”–one riff, over and over forever, with exactly as many words as there are in the chorus of “Scott Pilgrim”-the-song.

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MIKE: Well, of course, there is the Shoryken uppercut to the air juggle. Scott could do Street Fighter schtick till volume 30 and I would still eat it up. Then there’s allusions to Super Mario warp pipes and Metroid rolling ball attacks. And let’s not forget DrumMania. These are all well and good but some of the in-jokes in the later volumes crack me up, specifically the RPG ones. We’ll get to those when the time comes.

CHRISTINE: All of my knowledge of video games comes from the era of NES, Super Nintendo, chunky Gameboy and Sega Genesis–no later. I play NES and Gameboy “Color” (not DS) to this day, so I enjoyed the many video game references and gave myself a nerdy pat on the back for understanding them.

GRAEME: I think that Precious Little Life is a really uneven book. It’s not just that it doesn’t take off until the fight with Patel, pretty much at the end, but it kind of staggers from scene to scene without much momentum for the longest time, before that. Maybe that’s intentional – Scott is, after all, a slacker with no clear direction in this book – but it makes for a really disjointed reading experience. Probably also intentional but also sticking out for me on the re-read: Ramona brings all the awesome by herself. Before Scott talks to her when she’s delivering his package (Should I be giving out spoiler warnings? Probably not, but just in case: SPOILERS!), I really don’t feel like there’s any story at all, and then BAM. Everything starts.

(Also with the complaining, even though I REALLY DO LIKE THE BOOK, HONEST: Even when I read the book the first time, the whole “Scott is the best fighter in the province” bit seemed to come out of nowhere. For every single page of the book prior, he seemed like such a loser and suddenly he has superpowers and is awesome and fighty and shit? Does that seem weird to anyone else, or am I just grumpy?)

MIKE: Weirder than Ramona doing deliveries on rollerblades via subspace? After that was revealed to be not just a dream, all bets are off for what’s fair in the rest of the book.

GRAEME: Weird in a different way; I can buy Ramona being weird and different because she’s American, but Scott having super fighting powers that everyone else knows about, and he’s known as the best fighter in the province makes Scott’s world seem much less… I don’t know, normal? I find it strangely easier to deal with “The world is normal until Ramona brings all manner of craziness into it” than “Ramona is as crazy as everything else,” for some reason.

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DOUGLAS: It works for me, for a couple of reasons. One is that increasingly crazy stuff has been happening over the course of the volume, and this is just another surprise for comedic effect. The other is that of course Scott’s a “great fighter”: he clearly spends so much time playing video games that that’s the lens through which he experiences everything, and “defeating the evil exes” is another way of saying “getting over his jealousy about Ramona’s past relationships.” Matthew Patel is somebody she kissed once in seventh grade; he’s no threat at all. Gideon–she’s maybe still actually involved with. Which is why he’s the “final boss,” right?

CHRISTINE: I like how the fight scene essentially begins with Scott saying, “Guys, get off the stage.” He was prepared to play a few tunes with Sex Bob-omb, but now Scott is really ready to perform. Besides his bumbling pursuit of Ramona, this is one of the rare moments in the series when Scott takes ownership of a situation. Even his first kiss with Knives was initiated by the high schooler. But here, on stage with Patel, he’s not just reacting–he’s acting. We can finally use “Scott Pilgrim” and “hero” in the same sentence without also using the words “is not a.”

Just before the song/dance/fight sequence, Ramona sees Knives kissing Scott, which results in the name tag: “Ramona V. Flowers; Age: Unknown; Status: Scott is an idiot.” Just after the fight, Ramona makes out with Scott and lays down the premise of the next 5 volumes. But I don’t buy it. I know Ramona is not your Average Woman, but I don’t think she’d be cool with jumping on a guy who is making out with another girl–a high schooler, no less. Perhaps I’m making this analysis a tad retrospectively, in light of Ramona’s (SPOILER WORD) jealousy in Vol. 4. Then again, perhaps Ramona is simply more invested in Scott and their relationship in Vol. 4 than she is at the end of Vol. 1.

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MIKE: The standout scene in this book for me is the party where Scott first speaks to Ramona. The first interaction is incredibly awkward, and both parties know it straight off the bat. The following pages, where he begins his Flowers Investigation, are extremely relatable. Everything from the not-so-covert stalking to the shakedowns of suspects who might know something about her.

After they get together (subspace sequences aside), it feels forced until the chemistry takes over. It’s his initial courtship that rings true. The plotting involved with the Amazon order. The pleading. This is how smitten young men behave. Especially ones who endear themselves to the reader through pure infantile behavior.

Having said all that, I was instantly turning pages in this book, even with the whimper of a start. There was no question I was going to plow through the whole thing in one sitting (not that that is a real feat, but still). The looseness of the pencil work didn’t bother me the first time through but, like Graeme, I really notice it now. It’s a bit like the first archives in a long running web comic. O’Malley finding a voice.

EVAN: I agree with everyone else in terms of going back and seeing how raw O’Malley’s technical skills were way back in Vol. 1. Still, I liked SPPL the first time I read it, and enjoyed many of the same beats this time around. The character-building moments start right away; from the very beginning, we’re learning that Scott’s adrift in his own slackerness. There’s a bit of angst in Scott even at this point. The thing that O’Malley accomplishes that amazes me is the high level of cute without seeming twee. If I think back, I think I read Corey Lewis’s Sharknife (another Oni book) and was expecting another over-the-top, manga-inflected work when I got Scott Pilgrim. With that, the thing that struck me was how un-self-conscious SP Vol. 1 was. The heartache and the longing come across really well and the “twenty-something dude figuring out his life” stuff felt sincere enough that the video-game logic gobsmacked me. Man, I remember exactly where I was when I read the song-&-dance battle sequence: on the train back from work, smiling, laughing and mouthing the words to the songs to myself. I remember feeling like I could “hear” the music in my head.

Hey, is it too soon to talk about comparisons to the movie? Because, going back after watching the trailers a whole lot, I’m really struck by how much stuff is actually in the source material. That bit in the trailer where Scott nervously crushes the Solo cup? I thought that was something Wright threw in, but there it is on page 48. I’m excited to see more stuff like that as we read the books.

CHRISTINE: I’m not going to pretend that I am a comic book / graphic novel aficionado. I came to the Scott Pilgrim series late (later than Graeme) and cold (unless Cathy counts for something), but within the first twenty pages, I was hooked. The writing is hilarious, brilliant, silly and sassy–the art, complementary. After reading the series a few times, I continue to be thrilled by small details like the fact that Sex Bob-omb’s amplifier is branded as LAME BRAND and that Ramona wears Mr. Silly shoes.

My favorite character is probably the narrator (?) for subheads and interjections like NICE ONE, SCOTT! NOW TURN THE PAGE and repeated introductions of Knives as KNIVES CHAU, 17 YEARS OLD (Vol. 2). Scott Pilgrim is just plain fun.

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Several of my friends, twenty-something females with no prior comic book experience, have also found themselves engaged in—practically married to—the Scott Pilgrim series. If anyone recommended a graphic novel or series to check out (hint, hint), we would jump at the chance. Scott Pilgrim is a gateway series. How does this make pure-blood comic book lovers feel?

DOUGLAS: I say bring it on. As far as recommendations for further reading, there’s nothing else quite like Scott Pilgrim–well, there are a few things that are kind of like Scott Pilgrim but not as good. But three not-particularly-like-Scott things come to mind:

*Jaime Hernandez’s Perla la Loca, which is also about punk rock types trying to figure their lives out and is also incredibly funny in places (although it’s not a comedy in the sense that Scott is)–I posted a guide to the Hernandez brothers’ work on Techland a few months back.

*Kevin Huizenga’s Curses: just because the biggest O’Malley fan I know is also crazy about Huizenga’s stuff. (And so am I.)

*Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler: the less you know about this one going in, the more fun it is, but I’ll just say it has some unexpected tonal similarities to Scott Pilgrim (and couldn’t be more different in other ways, which don’t end with its title). We’re going to be talking about Jason’s new one, Werewolves of Montpellier, in the Comic Book Club later this week, too.

GRAEME: Douglas, what do you think of Brandon Graham’s work? The excellent King City seems like an ideal post-Scott Pilgrim comic to me.

DOUGLAS: I am full of shame, because I have not yet read it. I’m gonna! I’m gonna! I swear!

Next Wednesday, July 7: Volume 2, “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World”!

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