Scott Pilgrim Vols 1-5 by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Scott Pilgrim is twenty-three and unemployed. He plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-Omb, and lives in a flat so small he has to share a bed with his roommate Wallace. When the story opens, he’s dating Knives Chau, a highschool senior, and attracting the comments you might expect from his friends for dating someone so much younger. But all of this is to change when Ramona Flowers comes into his life. Scott falls for her immediately, and the attraction is mutual. But before they can be happy together, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends, who come after him one at a time, video-game-final-boss-style.

Dear Scott Pilgrim, where have we gone wrong? I was supposed to love you. You were supposed to be my new crack comic book series, as enjoyable to binge on as Fables or Bone (though very different in tone or content, I know). Instead, what happened was this, and I can’t even quite define what “this” is. Just a general feeling of mehness and disappointment. Somehow I didn’t connect with you. You were silly, and I like silly, but most of the time it was all a bit too much for me. And since when to I find things too silly? I’m worried, very worried, that this might be a sign I’m Getting Old. Aaaaaargh!

Seriously now, it wasn’t that I disliked Scott Pilgrim. But I was fully convinced I was going to love it and didn’t. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds this even more disappointing than actually hating a book you had no expectations at all about. Part of the problem was the humour. See, Scott Pilgrim is funny. It’s funny in a way I generally love: nerdy, very random, occasionally absurd, and full of references to other things. And yet, though my brain would register it was funny, I’d almost never actually laugh. I really can’t explain why this happened, but it did, again and again. The humour, however, was not the main problem. But I’ll get to that in a moment.


I liked the fact that the cultural references in Scott Pilgrim are very much my own. The sensibility behinds these books is that of my generation, and I suspect that Bryan Lee O’Malley grew up with many of the same things I grew up with. And Scott is nerdy! He wears a Zero shirt! There are references to bands and video games! (And also to animé, but I won’t mention those because I’m ignorant and they mostly went over my head.) And yet I never really felt at home in these books. It’s been a few weeks since I read them, and I think I’ve finally managed to put my finger on the reason why: it was the relationships between the characters that gave me trouble.

This is very much an idiosyncrasy of mine, and I expect that most other readers won’t experience the discomfort and the sense of disengagement I experience. The truth is that I’ve always felt, to steal a line from Oliver Sacks, a bit like an anthropologist on Mars. Even in my own life, I often have trouble making sense of how the majority of people relate to one another. This is a series in which certain questions I’d have asked are never asked, and in which the characters operate under assumptions that are very different from my own: that the exes of the person you’re dating will always be your enemies, that jealousy is unavoidable, that people will lie and play games with one another, that relationships will always involve certain feelings of entitlement, and so on. I know that these assumptions do govern many people’s lives and that I’m very much in the minority here. But I’ve always had trouble even grasping the concept of possessiveness, which is why most of the time I had trouble connecting with the characters.


(I did like the meta jokes.)
I want to clarify that I’m not saying I object to these things from an ethical standpoint, as in, “These books condone jealously and I think that’s bad! Oh noems!”. Not at all. And before anyone accuses me taking Scott Pilgrim too seriously, it’s also not that I’m disappointed because the books failed to make any revolutionary or life-changing points about relationships, or life, or the universe, or everything. It’s just that reading this series made me feel just like I usually feel when I socialise with most people my age: slightly puzzled and completely out of place.

The fact that these books are, for all their surreal elements, such an accurate portrayal of the lives of a group of twenty-somethings is actually one of their greatest strengths. The characterisation is excellent, and plus the cast is quite diverse. Also, the dialogue feels natural and was often (my brain fully acknowledges this) very funny. It’s interesting how reading Gasoline recently, my greatest disappointment of the year so far, made me appreciate Scott Pilgrim a lot more. There are books which are awful disappointments, and then there’s this. I did read all five volumes in only a couple of days, after all, and I didn’t for a moment have to force myself to go on. I just expected more – perhaps the fact that I connected so deeply with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost at Sea is a bit to blame here.

Honestly, this is a good series. My main problem with it was the fact that I’m me. Here are a few different opinions, from people who are saner and more well-adjusted than I am. You should listen to them:

The Book Zombie
A Book a Week (Vols 1 and 2, 3, 4, 5)
Books & Other Thoughts (Vols 1, 2, 3, and 4 and 5)
Bart’s Bookshelf (Vols 1-3)
Stuff as Dreams are Made On
Sophisticated Dorkiness (Vol 1)
The Written World (Vol 1)
Ready When You Are, C.B. (Vol 4)
Opinions of a Wolf

(Did I miss yours?)