Saturday 9 September 2017

are you evil, or are you really happy

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (2004)
Chosen by me from my shelf to tie in with a movie screening I went to tonight (by the delightful Fortune and Glory Film Club)


The first volume of Scott Pilgrim came out I think within my first year of working for Travelling Man. It was immediately obvious how good it was (and to everyone else, ordering it back in at that point was a pain in the arse). The final volume came out within the first year of owning my own comic store. So it holds a weirdly personal place in my heart, warts and all.
The biggest wart of all is definitely how much of an arsehole Scott Pilgrim is.
That certainly becomes a big point in the later volumes but re-reading the first one for this blog, 13 years on from first doing so my tolerance for him as a person is much, much less.
As the book is framed through his reality of video games and slacking it constantly tells us how awesome he is. Literally. In captions.
Knives Chau, his younger girlfriend, is a cool conquest (there is a nod to the western orientalism fetish though it is never criticised) for him to forget about as soon as a proper (white, older) woman, Ramona, comes along. You cant side with him, and the book - at this point - doesnt really pull him up on it. 
The sour taste that would leave is thankfully alleviated by a couple of things. 
One - Scott is shown as horribly immature (in the movie adaptation - to be covered on my sister blog Mondofilmaday very soon - that actually causes an imbalance as he seems a much better fit with Knives than Ramona).
And two - it's super funny and likeable in almost every other regard.
The jokes are terrific, pointed references, very quotable. Almost every character vivid and interesting. Kim Pine, the drummer for Scott's band Sex Bob-Omb, Wallace, the room-mate, and others feel like they could have whole books about just them.
The book mixes a very real grounded feel for Toronto with super silly stuff like magic powers and video-game logic and works it into a satisfying whole.

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