Day Eighty-Seven: Come On Pilgrim
We're now firmly in the final two weeks of this blog, and there's not a lot of room left for mucking about. We're going to have a lot of top stuff in the next thirteen days, although I haven't read Civil War #7 yet so it's possible we might have to drop everything and have a jolly good complain about how, on the whole, the main Civil War titles (and the over-arching plot) are so hopelessly inept and poorly done that they actually serve to drag down the few tie-ins which were actually any good. I'm also intending to do a short history lesson at some point over the next few days, which I promise will be more interesting than it sounds. For today, though, it's time to tuck into a slice of comics fried gold - the biggest indie hit of the last few years, and the comic which became a byword for quality comedy/adventure, Scott Pilgrim.
I know that every blogger and their gran has written about Scott Pilgrim by now, but it's of a sufficient quality to mean that I'd be negligent if I didn't mention it here (particularly if I'm going to be devoting entries to things like Fin Fang Foom). The series is a bit of an odd concept, but not a particularly complicated one: Scott Pilgrim is Canadian, 23 years old and is dating a high-schooler. He's in a band, he's as indie as you can get without being Steve Lamacq and Mark E. Smith's lovechild, and generally lives (as the title of the first volume says) a precious little life. The whole applecart's upset when Ramona Flowers, an American courier for Amazon.ca, starts taking shortcuts through his dreams at night in order to make her deliveries faster, and Scott's smitten. The high-schooler gets shown the door and Scott begins a quest to become Ramona's boyfriend. It all looks like it's going well, but there's a snag. It turns out that in order to become Ramona's boyfriend, Scott has to defeat Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends in combat. As you do.
Scott Pilgrim is about as far away from traditional indie slice-of-life comics as you can get without involving Superman. For a start, there's no realism involved here - instead, video game logic takes the place of conventional physics. Scott's is a world where after you beat someone up, they disappear and are replaced with a gold coin, and where energy drinks give you modifiers to your statistics rather than a refreshing isotonic burst. When something awful is about to happen, Scott spots a glowing circle on the floor in the corner of the room, and correctly identifies it as a save point. Even beyond the references to Mario and Final Fantasy, what goes on in Scott Pilgrim is ruled by what would make a great scene and by creator Bryan Lee O'Malley's flights of fancy, whether that being a girl being punched so hard the highlights fly out of her hair or a bad guy having secret powers gifted on him by his years of training and study as a vegan. It's the kind of comic where you're laughing out loud and grinning with a complete lack of self-consciousness because you've just read a bit where the plot stops for a few pages so one of the characters can explain to you how to make shepherd's pie. It is, above all, great fun to read.
The oddness and nerd references wouldn't make it a good comic if the writing and characters weren't up to scratch, though. Scott himself is perhaps the least layered of the book's mainstays - he's goodhearted and resourceful, but not the sharpest +2 sword in the armoury. He's lazy and can be pretty selfish, but he means well and he's no quitter. He's a clear hero, but he's not some cookie-cutter generic lantern-jawed lunkhead - he's a cleverly flawed mop-haired lunkhead instead. The other characters are more nuanced, which helps the book from descending into vacuousness (vacuity? I dunno). Knives Chau, the previously-mentioned high-schooler, is at first smitten with Scott, then blazingly angry towards him, then appears to move past him to be with a boy closer to her age (although O'Malley's not letting Knives wear her heart completely on her sleeve with that one, and it looks like she might just be using the kind of make-him-jealous tactics that we all remember so dearly from our own schooldays). Scott's bandmate Kim Pine is a taciturn presence, an ex-girlfriend of Scott's who plays drums in their band and who conceals a genuine concern for Scott's physical and emotional wellbeing behind a finely-honed veil of sarcasm and grouchiness. Ramona herself is not letting Scott in on the whole truth about her seven ex-boyfriends - one in particular, a boy named Gideon, is shaping up to be the end-of-level bad guy for the whole series - and that could well end up hurting Scott in the long run. Her relationship with Scott is sweet and relatable; there are no sweeping string sections and kisses in the moonlight, just teasing each other and walking in the snow.
I don't want to gush in an unseemly manner, but it's not really easy to talk about this book without banging on about it like a really determined Jehova's Witness who needs to get into your house to use the bathroom. For one thing, it's funny. I don't want to get into quoting lines at you, because then I'll just start quoting whole scenes at you, and at that point you might as well just buy the book anyway. The characters are immensely likeable - everyone's known a guy like Steven Stills, who's standoffish and quiet but not actually a jerk, or a guy like Scott's gay roommate Wallace, who's together and smart but gets drunk and heckles bands like the rest of us. You'll end up being annoyed when you reach the half-way point in any particular volume because that means you've got less than half of it left to enjoy. It's really very good indeed.
The story's set to run for six volumes, of which three have been published to date, with O'Malley hard at work on the fourth. A movie's also in the early stages of production, with Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright at the helm. Before that hits the screen, you'd do well to get hold of the published volumes of the book - it's true that if you don't know why a band called Sex Bob-Omb is funny, then you might not get as much out of it as someone who knows who Samus Aran is would, but at the heart of it, Scott Pilgrim's not about nerd references and video games and jokes about the X-Men. It's about the feeling you get when you start a band, the feeling you get when you rollerskate to work, the feeling you get when you decide to fight someone's seven evil ex-boyfriends to win the right to date them. It's about being young, and about being in love. Flawless victory!
