Category: Comics

There is a whole culture of people like me who (mis)spent their youths playing Nintendo games and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These people are now in the age range of 25-30. They are "tastemakers”. There is nothing that they want more than to relive the glory days when their biggest worry was finding a warp whistle to get to world eight without realising that, not having played the majority of the previous seven worlds, they were way behind the learning curve.

Their creative contemporaries aid them in this quest: if I make a reference to Super Mario Bros 1, 2 or 3, then other people in my age group will instinctively "get” it, and we can bask in the glow of the mid-eighties to early-nineties!

Then there are the people slightly younger than that, people who weren't strictly around for the video games when they were new, but who are into the alleged "8-Bit” aesthetic. They firmly believe that because something is old, it is automatically good. They may not have lived through it, but goddamn them if they're not going to get into it right now.

Scott Pilgrim was written for both of these demographics by a guy in the first demographic. It's easy to kind of love Scott Pilgrim, but also equally easy to be baffled and mystified by it. What is it trying to say? Why does it feel like it doesn't have much substance to it so much of the time, and why does it expose my snobbery? I look at these six volumes and I wonder why they took six years to write.  I know basically nothing about the comic book creative process except that in Japan the authors and artists are chained to their desks and forced to produce a chapter a week.

It's always going to take you less time to read something than it took the author to write it. Condensing six years of presumably hard work into a few weeks of casual reading is going to alter your perspective of it somewhat.  Scott Pilgrim is a work that appeals to what might be termed the "Jeremy Parish set”. It is through him that I first heard of the book, after all. It is also that sort of semi-obscure faux-joke that characterises the series.

Rather like Toy Story 3 was written for people who were 10 in 1995, Scott Pilgrim was written for people who were 23 in 2004, not for people who are 23 in 2010. The demos are fairly wide, to be sure, but Bryan Lee O'Malley undoubtedly wrote this for Canadian men born of a very specific place and time … how can something be so very "zeitgeist” but so obviously the product of one man's mind and experience?

One of the major "problems” with Scott Pilgrim, such as it is, can be summarized by presenting the pull-quote from the back cover of the final volume:

"Scott Pilgrim is the best book ever. It is the chronicle of our time. With Kung Fu, so, yeah: perfect.”

-Joss Whedon

Yes, Joss Whedon. I frequently get into trouble for criticising the man on the internet. He has done some good work in his time but the cult that has formed around him has always caused me to roll my eyes so hard so many times that I am now intimately familiar with the workings of my own brain.

But that's enough of a pre-amble. You must click on to find out what I think of this "epic of epic epicness” (oh God, kill me now … that word used to mean something).

My friend Melinda was somehow invited to a market test screening of something that was described to her as “indie/slacker/comic book”. Upon consultation with her brother, she theorised that it may be Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Turns out she was right. Attached are her brief impressions of the film:

“Yo it was Scott Pilgrim- no food stuffs provided, a thought that was a little stingy, considering they didn’t pay us and expected us to do a survey as well.

It’s clearly a niche film, and not really being a Michael Cera fan meant that I didn’t laugh at all the jokes, actually I thought a lot were pretty lowbrow. (pee jokes enough said) not that there’s anything wrong with that humour, but I am not charmed by Michael Cera. He needs to work harder than that to make me laugh.

There were parts that were weird for the sake of being weird, and it felt a little long, it was a solid two hour movie- but the fight scenes were good and the video game feel/ style made it a little different from your usual action movie.

I gave it a 7, good enough, even if it wasn’t something that i’d pay to see. My bro loved it and wants to see it again, so there you go.”

There you have it: the inside word on Scott Pilgrim from a woman who is interested in nerd type things, and a mention of her brother who I’ve never met – but I believe we’re not so very different, he and I (translation: nerdlinger to the maxtreme).

As for myself, I haven’t watched any of the trailers, and my exposure to Scott Pilgrim in general is very limited – but I have enjoyed Edgar Wright’s previous work and I was definitely going to see it anyway … even if “Sex Bob-omb” is a ridiculous idea and is the very reason that the terrorists hate us (even Canadians!).

Post script: Just watched the trailer, now my interest is piqued.