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.

Ant

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