O'Malley offers up a slow-paced and thoughtful look at an unusual time in life, when one finds oneself in a limbo between adolscence and adulthood. The strong characterization and convincing dialogue comes as no surprise to those who sampled O'Malley's last graphic novel, Lost at Sea, but he approaches this new project with a slightly different visual style. The title character is thoroughly flawed and doesn't come close to being the most likeable figure in the book. But Scott Pilgrim is familiar. We know him, because we can see a lot of him in ourselves. This is a tremendous graphic novel... until the video-game inspired ending.
Scott Pilgrim is 23 years old, jobless and essentially a kid at heart. He's surrounded by good friends and has a blast playing in his band, Sex Bob-omb. He's just started seeing a girl, a year after his last break-up, but this girl is only 17 and still in high school. It's a comfortable and easy relationship, but life gets complicated when Scott sees (and starts dreaming about) an American woman who recently moved to Toronto for a job.
O'Malley's simple style reinforces the more innocent qualities of the characters, but he's still able to convey the edgy and hip side of the players as well. Here, I get a strong sense that his art is influenced by that of classic manga creator Junko (Cinderalla) Mizuno, but hints of Jim (Grrl Scouts) Scouts pop up as well. I particularly enjoyed O'Malley's inclusion of odd but sharp little graphics to reinforce plot elements, from chord illustrations to some tongue-in-cheek narrative captions. Most importantly, O'Malley captures the youth and energy of these characters.
The ending is a video-game sequence in which the title character and his friends do battle with an evil, jealous ex-boyfriend and his demonic, manga-girl projections. And there's no mention of it being a dream sequence. My biggest problem with the sequence is that it completely abandons the tone, pace and genre of everything that comes before it in the book. It's quite distracting. Irreverent, playful and even innocent in its own surreal way, yes, but it's also jarring.
The oddball ending is far from enough to put me off. O'Malley has crafted an incredibly strong cast of characters, ones as strong and entertaining as those that populate Chynna Clugston-Major's Blue Monday comics.
Ultimately, this book is about Scott making an awkward transition from adolscence to adulthood. He's clung to his teen years as much as possible, and that's why he's with high-school student Knives Chau. But Ramona, the new girl in town who's closer to his own age, draws him into the more complex and risky realm of an adult relationship.
