So here I am: it's twenty years later, and I'm wondering how Scott Pilgrim holds up. The first time around, I read this series mostly in 2009 - five years after it started - and wrote short paragraphs for monthly round-ups. I'm not sure I'll have thoughts any more detailed or profound, but this time they'll have individual posts, for whatever that's worth.
The series has also been colored, by Nathan Fairbairn, since I last read it: I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's appropriate, mostly subdued color, and it looks like it could have been there the whole time, but it is Different and New (though New in this case means 2012) and I'm not huge fans of those guys.
Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life was originally published in 2004; in its original black-and-white it was an all-Bryan Lee O'Malley project. (Now, as I just said, there are also Nathan Fairbairn colors.)
Scot Pilgrim himself is a twenty-three year old Toronto slacker, just a bit surface-y and shallow in the way all twenty-three-year-olds tend to be. He's happy and vibrant, a mostly good person whose biggest flaw is his massive tendency to avoid doing the difficult stuff.
He's the bassist for the band Sex Bob-Om, and otherwise unemployed, sponging off his roommate Wallace Wells. And, as this first book opens, he's just started dating a high-schooler, lampshading his clearly arrested development in a way the rest of the cast (Wells, his bandmates Stephen Stills and Kim Pine) comment on repeatedly in the opening pages.
So that's the text, not even subtext: Scott is immature, in such obvious ways that it's the basis of the standard jokes of the group. His new girlfriend, Knives Chau, is nice but very high-schooler-y: starstruck to be watching this crappy band practice, talking about yearbook club and teen-girl gossip, etc.
It looks like this is just another episode in Scott's life, which will continue to meander on, with nothing too difficult or serious to impede him, just the way he likes it.
But then he sees a strange woman in his dreams, roller-skating through, and is immediately fascinated. And then he sees her in the real world, and starts to be, in his low-key slacker don't-be-too-energetic way, completely obsessed.
She's Ramona Flowers, an American - this is exotic and special, to at least this circle in Toronto - and works in delivery for Amazon.ca. Scott meets her, and they start to hang out and sort-of date very quickly. (Close readers will notice that I have not mentioned breaking up with the highschool girlfriend before chasing Ramona. Conflict-averse, go-with-the-flow Scott did no such thing.)
Ramona is pretty enigmatic and mysterious, but she does tell Scott one thing: if he's going to date her, he'll have to fight and defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. In the world of this story, this seems to only be mildly weird - Scott is said to be the best fighter in Ontario.
And that gets us all the way to what everyone already knows about Scott Pilgrim: the video-game inspired rock-and-roll boss fights. The first evil ex is Matthew Patel, who kissed Ramona and fought a bunch of jocks with her - they called each other boyfriend and girlfriend for about a week, so it totally counts - and who first sends Scott polite messages (which he ignores) and then calls Scott out during a concert. That gives us the big ending of the book, with Scott and his friends facing off against Matthew and his backing dancers/demon hipster chicks in an all-singing, all fireball-throwing, all Mortal Kombat-style extravaganza. And of course Scott wins: there wouldn't be much of a series if he didn't.
Other people have done similar things, before and since, but O'Malley's joyful mixing of manga and videogame fighting tropes into a thoroughly modern, North American world just clicks, from the very beginning. It all feels consistent, from the little info-cards that pop up to define newly appeared characters up to the big fight and the coins that defeated enemies drop. It's weird and specific in all the right ways: that's what makes it work as a story.
Scott is still sort of a jerk at the end here, of course: we all know that. He's got five more books to grow up in, and six more evil exes to get through. But he's starting on that path, and we think he's at least starting to get better and take at least a little bit of responsibility, maybe, once in a while.
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