Tuesday, January 22, 2008
It's Hard to be a Good Pilgrim in the City
One of my heroes, Scott McCloud, did several presentations in Portland early last summer on the margins of the great Platform Animation Festival (which unfortunately, is not scheduled again until 2009.) In the fiery wake of McCloud's Making Comics tour, I am sure that there are thousands that had never picked up a 5 x 7.34" Japanese sized Manga book in their lives before with wide-eyed characters (I still find them weird), who followed up on from his most enthusiastic "how this works" breakdowns of the Scott Pilgrim comic series by Canadian Author/Artist Bryan Lee O'Malley by checking them out.
The world of Scott Pilgrim is unique. It's a post-child, but not entirely adult emotionally and socially developmental ground, a bit like Enid's from Dan Clowes' Ghostworld. And it isn't rooted in what we commonly think of as reality either. A reference is made in a Comic Book Resources interview (best I have seen with O'Malley) where the books have been described as video game realism. Evil ex-boy friends appear out of nowhere and jilted girlfriends settle scores in Ninja like comic book battles that are featured with multistoried dive gymnastics and sound effects depicted with words like SWOK and KPOK! The characters live in a service job barrista or unemployed bubble a bit like Richard Linklater's Slacker, but in a Toronto with defined seasons where dreams and the fantastic can take center stage at any given moment. O'Malley certainly has both own style and a sense for universal teen and post-teen archetypes of experience. He also loves to play with form. His characters break down a fourth wall by referring to the book itself sometimes. His meta tags introducing or reintroducing characters and occasional asides are among the most entertaining aspects of his books. But mostly, it is a delight to see how he molds line, frame, shape and size in black and white to create his own universe.
Four Scott Pilgrim books are out currently in what O'Malley says will be a series of six. I read the first last summer and enjoyed its quirkiness, but I think the real reward of the Pilgrim books is to be found in a a bit of immersion. I returned to Pilgrim with a read through with books 1-3, and am probably going to hold off a little bit on four as an incentive to be able to read them again prior to four, because it will feel a little bit like a fond dream redux before the latest installment.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:24 AM
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