Scott Pilgrim: Defining My Twenties, Defining the 2000s
Recently, writer Kieron Gillen referred to Scott Pilgrim as “the definitive 00s indie [comic] book,” echoing a statement I’d always believed deep in my heart, but had never really articulated before. Released as a series of six graphic novels from 2004-2010 (a movie adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, was released a few weeks after the final volume in August 2010), the Scott Pilgrim series spanned the majority of the decade, and captured the zeitgeist of the era better than just about any other comic, or media at all really, released at the time. In doing so, it also came to define and dominate my early twenties.
Do you remember Borders book store? Hell, do you remember book stores at all? My local mall still has a Barnes and Noble that seems to be thriving (or, at least, it was pre-Covid), but the greatest advantage Borders had over B&N were the giant plush chairs laid out all around the store. It was an awesome place to spend a random day off of work reading books you weren’t going to buy (oops, maybe that’s why they went bankrupt), and that’s what I was doing one day in 2009 when I, on a whim, picked up the first volume of Scott Pilgrim. A few hours later I had inhaled the first three volumes and become absolutely obsessed. I, essentially, didn’t put the books down for two or three years after that. They sat in a little stack on a shelf next to my desk for me to flip through any time my attention began to wander. It’s a wonder I didn’t wear the ink off the pages.
That first volume (which the movie’s first act covered with about 90% accuracy) really felt like nothing I had ever seen before in a comic, even though it was scrapped together from various genres I had a lot of experience with, and it was brilliantly paced in just the right way to suck me in and get me invested. While the first two acts have a few mentions of strange occurrences and briefly brings up Ramona using the Subspace Highway that runs through Scott’s head, they’re largely a more low-key, slice of life/coming of age story that establishes the characters and dives into their lives in detail. I had read on the back cover that Scott had to fight Ramona’s “seven evil exes,” but was so engrossed in the early parts of the volume that I had forgotten until the final act (brilliantly) upended the entire tone by breaking out into video game-inspired fight scenes (and a song!). My jaw was on the floor. What a way to lull you in, then sock you right in the face with something new and energetic. Later volumes would more evenly mix these two attributes, but as an introduction, this set up was perfect.
Of course, like I said, this was all cobbled together from genres I was experienced with. Indie comics (and even indie films) had spent decades doing gentle, black-and-white coming of age stories, which I have quite the soft spot for, while the action was heavily inspired by video games and Shonen manga, which have always been my jam. This mixture of the two was new to me, but it turns out that it had a name: “magical realism,” or when a mostly realistic setting and story has one or two unusual, sci-fi or supernatural elements. Magical realism dominated webcomics especially, which seemed to be at their most prominent during that era of Scott Pilgrim. Something Positive, like most webcomics at the time, found cynical humor in the foibles of a group of twenty-something friends who were meant to be just like you and your friends (or just like the author and his friends), except one had a cat who was essentially sentient goop with superpowers; Shortpacked! mined both humor and drama from the lives of a group of normal toy store employees, except for that one employee who had once fought aliens as a government agent, had super-speed when she ate sugar, and was, for all intents and purposes, a living cartoon character. Even Scott Pilgrim creator/writer/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley based a lot of the characters and situations in his story off of his own life, romances, and friends, just punched up a bit. I’m not sure whether Scott Pilgrim started this trend or just became the best known example of it, but it’s certainly a calling card of the era; dig down far enough in my hard drive and you’ll even find thirty pages of my own graphic novel based on my friends and I but with just a hint of magical realism. It was a total Scott Pilgrim ripoff, of course.
On my first read-through of the series, though, I was mostly fascinated and excited by the similarities between Scott as a character and myself, although looking back, those similarities were awfully superficial. Scott and I were both 23 at the time. Scott was in a bad garage band and played bass; so was I! Scott wasn’t very good at his bass; I could really only play chords and read tab, and never actually understood music theory! Scott’s signature drink was a gin and tonic; so was mine, though I’m mostly a hard cider guy these days. Scott and I both even hated beer!
I feel you there, Scott.
In retrospect, I wasn’t actually all that much like Scott besides those few small similarities. I think what I was reacting too, though, was the way Scott Pilgrim reflected the kind of life my friends, myself, and other people my age were living at the time. It really was the first piece of media I ever saw that accurately reflected what it was like to be a (admittedly, white) twenty-something millennial in the late 2000s (and, sadly, up to the modern day). These characters weren’t the Gen X slackers of Clerks, whose lives were defined by their resentment, by how much they hated their jobs and general lack of direction. Scott and his friends had all gone to college yet worked terrible dead end jobs (Scott and Stephen at restaurants, Stacey as a barista, Kim at a video store, Wallace appeared to be some sort of customer service representative). None of them seemed to have any long term goals. But it also never came up. For them it was just a matter of fact thing, “this is just how life is for us nowadays,” and that feels very true to my experience. Us millennials have come to expect conditions to be awful, whereas Gen X often seemed shocked when things didn’t go their way. Scott’s first real moment of personal growth and victory was simply getting a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant after over three volumes of being unemployed, and the series legitimately treated even that crappy little job as an actual victory. As someone who was working at a Little Caesars at the time and was just happy to have some money coming in, I got it.
To be honest, this is still far too relatable to me.
(This excellent Scott Pilgrim side-story, featuring Kim Pine dealing with nightmarish roommates, also feels specific and relatable to the millennial experience, unfortunately.)
Again, much of this stems from O’Malley’s own personal experiences dealing with the same kind of situations, and that youthful energy and experience being funneled directly into the comic made it feel vital and real and modern. Just last week, in an Instagram story, O’Malley himself chalked much of the series’ success to this very aspect.
That said, the series covers a year in Scott’s life, while O’Malley wrote and drew the series over a seven or eight year period. O’Malley was growing up and maturing faster than Scott, and that allowed the series and its perspective to evolve in a way that greatly benefited Scott and his friends as characters, and also in a way that seemed to mirror the progression of society at large.
I’m going to guess that my saying I saw myself in Scott a few paragraphs back may have made a few of you momentarily cringe. Nowadays Scott is fairly widely recognized as very much not being an aspirational figure; he’s a character who was often selfish or oblivious, sometimes even destructively so. I think sometimes there’s a narrative among fans that the series doesn’t recognize this, but that’s definitely not true. Even the very first volume criticizes Scott; very early on, through Wallace, it calls out his “relationship” with Knives as being wrong in a way the movie never does, and even the title, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, is calling him out in multiple ways. Yes, Scott has a precious little life that’s simple and cute and doesn’t amount to much, but also, he has precious little life because what life he has isn’t much and isn’t great. But the last two volumes especially put Scott through the wringer, forcing him to confront his own inadequacies, mistakes, and bad habits, forcing him to own up to the ways he’s hurt the people around him, and specifically having him draw power from learning to consider and understand the people around him instead of being so self-centered (He literally defeats Gideon with the “Power of Understanding”).
Scott and the series both grew in the same way that society around them seemed to. The 2000s were an era of cynicism and the rise of reality TV, the last time society could be self-centered and oblivious and not be called out on it; the 2010s started forcing society to reckon with our sins and mistakes and dragging them into the spotlight, demanding that society be better, and demanding specifically that men be better. If Scott Pilgrim originally represented an era where someone like Volume 1 Scott could be a hero, then it also killed that era and helped usher in one where the growth and introspection Volume 6 Scott gains are necessary for anyone, hero or not. Scott Pilgrim didn’t just come to define the 2000s in the world of indie comics — it also helped determine what would come next.
Last week was the tenth anniversary of the Scott Pilgrim movie, and thus also the final volume of the comics, and the celebration surrounding this milestone has had the series on my mind. When I think back to those days when Scott Pilgrim defined my life, a lot of what I remember is the superficial stuff — seeing myself in the story in silly ways, forcing friends to read/watch it, seeing the movie multiple times in the theater and buying the soundtrack, the Scott Pilgrim hoodie I wore for eight years until it was ratty and torn, the one social media website where my avatar has always been, and always will be, Scott Pilgrim — and to be honest, I kind of miss being young enough that something could consume me so thoroughly, so completely. Scott Pilgrim will never age past 24; I turned 33 this year.
But that time of my life was also the beginning of a transitional period for me, not unlike the kind of introspection and growth Scott was forced to endure. Sure, it would be a few more years before I’d fully find the courage to come to some major conclusions about myself and my life, and almost everybody starts growing in their early twenties, but I’d still like to think that the lessons I learned from Scott Pilgrim helped me reach that point. It would be the perfect legacy for the series that defined my twenties.
COMICS VS. MOVIE
In my perfect world where funding and the Box Office don’t matter, Scott Pilgrim would have been split into two movies, one covering the first three volumes and one covering four through six. I’m not just splitting them in half arbitrarily; while the Seven Evil Exes plot runs through the whole series, the first three volumes also cover the story of Scott getting over his ex, Envy, while the final three have their own little three act structure, with Scott admitting he loves Ramona in four and taking their relationship to the next level, their relationship disintegrating in five, and Scott owning up to his past and earning a second chance in six. They wouldn’t have to be 100% faithful adaptations — I’d want director Edgar Wright to make the material his own the way he did the actual movie — but this would be a format that could do every aspect of the Scott Pilgrim comics justice.
Unfortunately, we live in the world where the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World bombed at the Box Office and became a cult hit at best, a world where all six volumes were crammed into a two hour film. I hope this doesn’t make me sound too down on the film. Straight up, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is my absolute favorite movie. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and could probably recite it in my sleep. I think the cast and music are perfect, the choreography fun, the cinematography gorgeous, and the direction awfully clever. It’s also gut-bustingly funny.
The humor, though, is the trade off for the loss of depth. The comics are incredibly funny in their own right, but they also have space to flesh out the entire cast, even minor supporting characters. The movie doesn’t have the time to flesh them out, so instead it reduces most of the supporting cast to one-note characters, but makes them funnier in return. For example, the comics explore Stephen Stills’ past and love life, not just his musical ambition; the movie focuses solely on his musical anxiety, but makes it a million times funnier than the comic. Same goes for Young Neil, who in the comics starts out as a bit of a blank slate tag-along who grows resentful and bitter over this role; the movie simply makes him a lovable idiot. If you’d only seen the movie you’d never guess that Kim is the third most fleshed out character (after Scott and Ramona) in the comic; the only hint is that the movie gives her two character traits (“grumpy” and “Scott’s ex”) to Stephen or Neil’s one.
Now, I admire the skill it takes to make Young Neil of all people perhaps the funniest character in the whole movie, and I’m not that fan whining because not all of my favorite gags or moments from the comic made it into the movie, but I am saying that this shortage of time and depth hurts the movie. It hurts Ramona especially, oddly marginalizing her in the movie. Those who call Ramona a “manic pixie dream girl” do so based solely off the movie, because in the comic she’s very much fleshed out, with her own past, perspective, and goals separate from Scott. The comic even acknowledges that Gideon is just as much her enemy as Scott’s and allows the two to fight him together and defeat him with simultaneous attacks, while the movie quite literally sidelines her in the battle against her own abuser.
Likewise, while movie Scott follows a similar arc to comic Scott, his growth in the movie feels much more rushed, and thus less earned. The comic has the space to have Scott really reckon with the way he’s hurt the people, and especially the women, in his life, and thus when he apologizes to Kim or Knives, or even Envy or Young Neil, they’re these giant, earned, cathartic moments. The movie hits many of these same beats (Scott’s “I’m sorry for everything, I’m sorry for me” to Kim or his dubbing Young Neil “Neil,”) but without the build up they mostly feel perfunctory. Movie Scott may die for his sins, but he doesn’t really have to confront them the way his comic counterpart does. Movie Scott’s arc works, comic Scott’s just works much better.
Ultimately, that’s it. I love the movie, and as a two hour film compared to a six volume series of graphic novels, it’s more approachable and easier to pop on when I get in the mood for some Scott Pilgrim, but the comics are still the more fulfilling and the better take on the story of the two.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!