Ant's Rant: Scott Pilgrim Graphic Novel Series

Scott Pilgrim is a hilarious and action-packed graphic novel series about a young guy who falls in love with a girl and must fight to win and keep her heart. This sounds like a pretty standard fare story if you simplified it in such a way, but it’s the character, the humor, the style, and real plot that makes this story a winner.

Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old unemployed bassist with a love for classic video gaming. He meets a girl named Ramona Flowers in his dreams who he quickly falls in love with and quickly begins dating. Soon he finds out that in order to continue dating her, he needs to defeat her 7 evil exes. All of Ramona’s exes band together to form The League of Evil Exes, whose sole purpose is to destroy anyone Ramona gets intimately involved with. These exes are what gamers would call bosses, so Scott must go through 7 boss fights. There’s actually 17 action sequences throughout the 6-part series, so don’t think it’ll ever run dry on action.

Having mentioned that Scott is a classic video game lover, it needs to be noted that Scott lives in a world that follows pretty much every classic gaming rule ever established. In this story, there is an RPG-style leveling system, items, weapons, enemy henchmen summons (demon bat girls and robots), and extra lives that are earned throughout, pixelated text thrown all over, and the bosses even drop gold coins when they’re defeated. There are numerous references to classic games thrown in the dialog and story. Scott even dreams he’s in certain scenarios like Legend of Zelda, for instance. This is like one huge fan service to gamers everywhere. Heck, all of Scott’s bands had game-related names (Kid Chameleon and Sonic & Knuckles were his previous bands).

Scott has more to deal with than just Ramona’s exes. He also has the stress of finding a job, making his band (Sex Bob-bombs, another gamer joke) work, dealing with his own exes and shaking off an obsessed and clingy underaged (17 year old) girlfriend. Ramona actually finds herself doing battle with some of Scott’s exes herself in some of the more epic battle scenes.

What I love about this series are the off-the-wall battle scenes that are so reminiscent of battles I’m sure many of us have been through in our experiences in gaming. The characters are all different and most have some degree of depth to them, depending on their relevance to the story. I find myself relating to Scott Pilgrim in so many ways, which is another thing that personally drew me in. The story also finds ways to throw in some dating advice that could really help in the real world (for instance, don’t date an underaged Chinese girl unless you want to be chased around the city by her angry bus-splitting sword-wielding father). The chemistry between characters and the dialog is almost always amusing.

What I didn’t like was the ending. I understand that it did end on a closed note, and it was a fairly happy ending. It just didn’t seem very logical to me. The direction Ramona’s character was going in throughout the last two volumes doesn’t seem to make sense with the direction she goes in at the end of the 6th and final volume. Another thing to note is that there’s a strong level of homosexuality in this series, so if that’s not your bag, you really can’t ignore the rampant gay jokes. I also didn’t like it taking place in Toronto. Canada sucks. My only other wish is that Bryan Lee O’Malley would release a collection of all of the Scott Pilgrim side-stories he wrote out. I can’t seem to get my fix of this series. Thankfully, there’s a movie coming on August 13th and a 4-player 2D 16-bit sidescrolling beat em up downloadable game releasing in August for Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade that is very reminiscent of The Simpsons Arcade Game.

Overall I give this comic an 8.5/10. I’d give it a 9, but that’s the highest score I’ll give anything since I don’t believe anything could ever get a perfect 10. I take off half a point because of the ending, mostly. I recommend everyone see the movie when it comes out, but I recommend even more so that you all read the books, especially if you have ever played video games in your youth.