Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face."

A friend of mine who is an enthusiastic comics reader once told me that she couldn't stand the Scott Pilgrim series -- couldn't even finish the first volume. For a microsecond, the sentence "well, that means we can't be friends any more because clearly there is a profound spiritual chasm between us" flashed across my brain; then I pulled myself together and asked her why. "Urgh!" she said, her face contorting in disgust. "Scott is such a dick! How can anyone stand him?"

She had a point, but the funny thing was that this fairly obvious and fairly salient fact had somehow passed me by. Throughout my reading of the (at that time) four volumes of the series, I'd been so caught up in the candy-coated rush of it all, the wit and the metatextuality and the gleeful insanity of Scott's world -- all of this delivered through O'Malley's gloriously kinetic drawing style, with its thick outlines reminiscent of an early Genndy Tartakovsky cartoon, large-eyed character design clearly owing something to manga but hybridised so cleanly with American influences and O'Malley's own individual style that calling it "mangaïste" seems overly crude, and this is without even getting into O'Malley's use of a mostly flat picture plane and shallow perspective, or the way he incorporates explanatory captions and visual elements derived from video games into the story -- that I hadn't taken much notice of the main character's... well... character. It didn't matter that much to me, to be honest; there was so much in the series to enjoy. It was a bouncy, frenetic, hilarious, incredibly skilfully made comics series which brought me so much joy that I couldn't see anything negative about it.

But once my friend (who is a person of great wisdom in many ways) had said that Scott Pilgrim was a dick, I found I had to concede the point, even though it had never occurred to me to think of him that way. After all, Scott's childlike self-absorption, his complete inability to plan for the future, his tendency to freeload off his friends, and his blissful lack of awareness of anything (and I do mean anything) beyond whatever currently has his attention, are traits that, in a real person, would have me smiling politely and making excuses to leave after about five minutes. Scott is not malicious, but he's careless and thoughtless and irresponsible to a breathtaking degree. Of course, in Scott Pilgrim's world, it doesn't matter that much that he's kind of a dick; Scott Pilgrim's world revolves around Scott Pilgrim. He is, and knows himself to be, the hero of his own story, which is most definitely an epic action-adventure drama and not anything so inconvenient as a tragedy. Things just sort of fall into place around him.

Or at least, they used to. Now that volume five, Scott Pilgrim Vs The Universe, is out, and now that I've finally gotten around to reading it, I'm beginning to wonder whether the dickishness was in fact part of the point all along. If volume four was Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, volume five could have been Scott Pilgrim Runs Around Frantically While It All Falls Apart. Suddenly it doesn't seem like a given any more that Scott's going to defeat the seventh evil ex-boyfriend and live happily ever after with Ramona. Life is still exceptionally convenient for Scott (turns out he has rich and indulgent parents, which explains a lot if you think about it), but for the first time not only the reader but Scott himself is aware of the other characters having lives that have nothing to do with him. For the first time, Scott is made to reflect on the things that he's done, and the conclusions he comes to aren't always pleasant.

While he's fighting this volume's evil ex-boyfriends, Scott wrestles with the things he's learned about Ramona, and about himself, and tries out a little bravado -- "I just have to defeat you and Gideon, and then everything will be perfect!" -- but for once his unstoppable self-belief seems to be a denial of reality rather than a means of warping it to fit his fantasies. The kinds of things that are standing in between him and perfection are not things he can fight -- at least, not with his fists. A bit of emotional maturity is called for, and that's something Scott's never shown any sign of developing up to now.

As of the end of volume five, Scott Pilgrim is still largely the same ditzy, oblivious, irresponsible manchild of the previous volumes, but his world has been tilted on its axis. Uncertainty has been allowed to impinge on him. He is dimly aware of being inadequate, but has only the vaguest notions as to why or how, or what to do next. And I share Scott's uncertainty, though for a different reason: with this development, the series seems to be pulling the rug out from underneath itself, unravelling its original premise and structure. This kind of auto-deconstruction is a risky manoeuvre: pull it off, and the results can be magnificent (it's a very Grant Morrison move, now that I think of it), but a failed auto-deconstruction is just a mess, and for a series as light-hearted and frolicsome and joyous as Scott Pilgrim to collapse under the weight of its previously-unsuspected ambitions would be a terrible shame.

What is Scott Pilgrim's world, if it does not revolve around Scott Pilgrim? I don't know the answer to that one; I hope Bryan Lee O'Malley does. Only volume six can remove all doubt.

Microcomics

One of the things I find perennially fascinating about comics is the way constraints can spur artists on to new heights of creativity. Sometimes the constraints are aesthetic and sometimes they are purely physical; sometimes they're self-imposed and sometimes they're imposed from outside. Often there's no way to tell which is which as you read; only the artist knows whether the decision to, for example, use only black ink came from economics or aesthetics. Sometimes it's in the overlap between economics and aesthetics that the most fertile ground is to be found.

One extremely obvious physical constraint that gets overlooked precisely because it's so obvious is size. Most comics tend to be within a relatively small range of sizes; there's a lot more variation on the market now than there was 20 years ago, but for practical reasons, comics much bigger or much smaller than the standard US floppy format tend to be niche productions. So it is with Brian John Mitchell's minicomics, which are so small they should really be called microcomics. Smaller than a box of matches, they are; so small that you could lose one between the sofa cushions without even creasing the pages. Even smaller than the 8-page Greenbelt comics I blogged about three years ago, which were made on one side of a sheet of A4 card. The fact that he's managed to create coherent and interesting stories in such a tiny space is enough to raise eyebrows.

The stories themselves are relatively conventional. XO (art by Melissa Spence Gardner) is a straight-up power fantasy of the "protagonist gets to kill unpleasant people without consequences" type; it's competent but unremarkable. Lost Kisses (art by Mitchell) is a stick-figure comedy series about bad relationships which may or may not be autobiographical. I found it very funny and occasionally infuriating; the main character is self-absorbed and sometimes a little self-righteous with it -- a dangerous combination. I waver between thinking that the humour I find in the series is entirely unintentional (and feeling very uncomfortable) and thinking it's entirely intentional (and laughing like a hyena). The truth is probably somewhere in between; certainly Mitchell sometimes seems to be laughing at his protagonist, but some of the most off-putting statements seem to be the ones where he is most sincere, and that makes me wonder.

Probably the best of the three is Worms (art by Kimberlee Traub), a sci-fi thriller about a girl embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy involving people being injected with apparently extra-terrestrial worms. The storytelling is straightforward enough, but Traub's stark, expressionist art does an impressive job of conveying the main character's bleak situation and her nightmarish mental state.

It's obvious that Mitchell is only starting out with these comics; he may want to use them as a springboard for something on a (literally and figuratively) larger canvas. I'd be intrigued to see what a more experienced creator could do with a set of teeny-tiny pamphlets like these. But as an experiment, these microcomics are so pared-down that it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a bit of a dead end from an artistic point of view -- the ne plus ultra of minimalism. There's never more than one panel per page, which limits what can be done in the way of visual or narrative effects, and while, as I said, limits and constraints can encourage creativity, too extreme a set of limits can be stifling. These microcomics are interesting, but not likely to start a trend.

I ATEN'T DEAD.

I don't even want to think about how long it's been since I updated this blog. A combination of pressure at work, evening classes, co-authoring a guidebook to Dublin, and planning the paper I was to present at this conference on comics ate up all my spare time and brainspace. Now my evening classes have all finished, my workplace is less pressured, the guidebook is on the verge of being sent to the printers, and the conference is over (and a very good conference it was too). So there is hope that this blog may turn out to have been only mostly dead, in the manner of a Marvel superhero.

For complicated personal reasons no doubt related to the phase of the moon or fluctuations in sunspot activity or something, my enthusiasm for comics had waned over the past six months or so. It has been months since I went into a comics shop; my pile of unread graphic novels remains stubbornly and intimidatingly high. (I did eventually put them on a shelf, which doesn't make it any easier to read them but at least prevents me from tripping over them in the dark.) The conference has rekindled that enthusiasm, as I had hoped it would, and I will, I think, have more to say here and elsewhere on the subject of comics. Today I even bought new comics for the first time in ages -- Parasyte vol 1 and Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe, which has a shiny shiny cover and is no doubt shiny in a metaphorical sense as well.

Review: What It Is by Lynda Barry, Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie

This review first appeared in the Irish Times on the 31st of January 2009.

What It is by Lynda Barr. Jonathan Cape, 280pp, £16.99 and Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. Jonathan Cape, 128pp, £15.99

Every so often, a work of art comes along that defies description, not just because it crosses over categories and blends genres, but because it challenges the very idea of putting art into categories and genres. What It Is is just such a work. Part creative writing course, part memoir, part free-associative visual essay on the nature of creativity, it invites readers not merely to linger over the work itself, but to use it as a tool for delving into their own memories and imaginations. If there were ever a graphic novel that demanded active engagement from the reader, this is it.

Lynda Barry is best known as a cartoonist, but she has also been a painter, illustrator, playwright and (most importantly for What It Is) a teacher. Her author biography states that she has “found they are very much alike”, which goes some way to explaining the approach she has taken with What It Is. Although the main body of the book is interspersed with snippets of memoir and there is a chunk of handbook pages at the end, most of the pages are collages. They mingle drawings, paintings, handwritten captions, and extracts from textbooks, ads, and children’s homework in a kind of democratic profusion.

The elements of each page are so skilfully arranged and the pages themselves so dense with imagery and so crammed with ideas that each one could be framed and hung in a gallery; but to do that would be missing the point. What It Is is a “work of art”, but the operative word in this case is “work”. To treat it as a beautiful object to be looked at and admired and not touched would be to misunderstand the nature of Barry’s project.

Barry’s agenda as a writing teacher, and in creating What It Is, is not to produce professional writers who earn fame and money through the practise of a marketable skill, but to awaken “it” – in her own words: “At the centre of everything we call ‘the arts’, and children call ‘play’, is something which seems somehow alive . . . There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back”.

You could call it creativity, or imagination, or freedom; whatever “it” is, it is what makes us feel as if we are really living, rather than just going through the motions. Thinking kills it, and the purpose of the exercises contained in the latter portion of the book is to short-circuit the rational processes and draw forth an image – a thing to play with that will play back, much like What It Is itself. For What It Is is a challenging and unsettling book. You don’t just read it: it reads you. There are very few works of art that make so direct a demand on the reader, or fulfil their demands with so rich a reward.

It’s a bit of a letdown to move from the sublimely unique to the merely excellent; but such is the fate of the reviewer. Aya of Yop City is the sequel to Aya de Yopougun and the second in the ongoing Aya series, chronicling the rollercoaster lives and tangled love affairs of Ivorian girl Aya and her friends and family. Writer Marguerite Abouet was born in the Ivory Coast and depicts her motherland with just the right balance of affection and honesty.

The period when the story takes place is the late 1970s, when the country was going through a prosperous phase that was soon to end. In this volume there are hints of the forthcoming economic decline, but for the most part life in Aya’s Abidjan is sunny and pleasant; Abouet juggles farcical soap-opera plots with dazzling ease, aided by Clément Oubrerie’s vibrant art; his designs for each character are so alive with personality that, despite the large cast, it’s impossible to get confused. But the real star of Aya of Yop City is Abidjan itself. Through the lives of their characters, Abouet and Oubrerie bring the city to life: a city that is distinctly African, distinctly Ivorian, so vivid and real that you can practically smell the Chicken Kédjénu – or cook it for yourself from the recipe at the back.

Explaining the appeal of manga: what is the point?

So apparently Tom Crippen of The Hooded Utilitarian doesn't like manga and is asking for an explanation of its appeal. I'm not going to provide one, because I find the very question irritating, and Crippen's way of asking it doesn't do him any favours. (Here's a hint: if you genuinely want a helpful response from people with an interest in manga, don't refer to manga's visual style as having a "kindergarten feel".)

The thing is, when someone says "I can't get past the character designs", my immediate reaction is not "but not every manga has that kind of character design" or "that iconography is ultimately derived from Walt Disney" or "it's a form of symbolism related to character traits". My immediate reaction is: Try harder. And if trying harder doesn't work, stop banging on about it.

Look, it's pretty simple: the fundamental storytelling DNA of manga, as well as the more obvious visual aesthetics, are different from those of Western comics. Oh, there's variation within both Western comics and manga, and there are places where they nearly touch -- but any two randomly-selected Western comics will be closer to each other than they are to any randomly-selected manga, and vice versa. This is to be expected; Japan's culture is distinct, complex, unique, and thoroughly different from Western cultures, and the typical manner of producing and publishing sequential art in Japan is radically different from the typical manner in which Western firms and individuals go about it.

This has a number of implications, of which I will focus on two. Firstly, the visual language of manga is different from the visual language of Western comics. All of those half-tones and flowers and dewy eyes and popping veins and splashy layouts -- they have a meaning, or rather a range of meanings, that is not immediately apparent to a reader schooled in Western comics. They're not just noise, which is how they appear if you're not used to them, just as a foreign language sounds like meaningless babble until you learn enough words to understand some of it. This is why I say "try harder": if the visual surface of a manga work puts you off, if it seems to be noisy and slick and all the same, that's probably because you're not reading it right, not properly distinguishing what is meaningful from what is not meaningful. And the only way to learn how to read it right is to keep reading. If you really want to learn to enjoy manga, or at least to understand it, you can't let your initial repulsion or incomprehension throw you out after a brief perusal. That's like giving up on foreign travel because the people talk funny.

Secondly, there are things Western comics can do that manga can't do, and vice versa -- or, more accurately, things that manga don't do that Western comics do. (And I don't exempt so-called "OEL manga" from the category of "Western comics". OEL manga are like haiku in English: they may be very fine short English poems, but they're not really haiku.) As a corollary to this, if the things you look for and greatly enjoy in comics are the things that Western comics do and manga don't, there's no real reason why you would find manga appealing. And that's fine, you know? Not everyone can like everything. There are always going to be cultural conversations that you can't participate in, just because the appeal of the cultural thingamajig in question evades you to the point that you can't stand to look at it.

But if you can't stand to look at it, you have to concede that you don't have much to say about it. As Wittgenstein would say, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. Or, as I've put it more crudely elsewhere: if you don't know what you're talking about, shut the hell up. This is a pretty obvious principle that is widely ignored by the comics commentariat, which is one of the reasons why I don't read many comics blogs.

What's more, it irritates me intensely when people stand up and say "I am ignorant; educate me!" when, frankly, the resources are out there for them to educate themselves if they cared to put the effort in. I considered making a comment to Crippen's post, but decided against it, because hey! I don't actually give a damn if he likes manga or not, and it's not my job either to do his homework for him or to defend the honour of manga. Manga needs no defence, from me or from anyone else.

I'll concede that he makes one worthwhile point about a fundamental difference between manga and Western comics -- albeit he makes it a little clumsily, so that it took me three reads of the paragraph to figure out what he was saying. It's true that manga, in almost every case that I'm familiar with, lets the images drive the story with the words assisting; more complex interplay between words and pictures is rare, almost unknown. That's one of the things I mentioned above that falls into the category of "things Western comics do that manga don't do". (It's a factor that contributes to the speed with which manga can be read -- obviously not the only factor, but one of the most important and least-remarked-on.) It doesn't seem to me a good enough reason to give up on manga, but my aesthetic priorities are different from Tom Crippen's, and that's okay.

I should perhaps restate: I don't have any investment in people liking manga. Like it, don't like it; it's all the same to me. I do have an emotional investment in people not talking as if a liking for manga is a charge in need of a defence, or conversely as if a lack of liking for manga is a disease needing a remedy. Like I've said before more than once: different people like different things, and that's okay. Or, to put it more seriously: it is not possible for anyone to read everything. It is therefore necessary to prioritise your reading according to what you think is most likely to produce whatever results you look for from reading -- mostly pleasure, but also intellectual stimulation, vicarious experience, various kinds of aesthetic thrill. If, for whatever reason, you find that one particular segment of all the comics in the world is incapable of producing those results, there's no shame in saying to yourself "this doesn't appeal to me" and not bothering. And there's no particular reason why you should dig deep and try hard to find out if that segment could produce the right results, unless you really think it's likely to do so if you make an extra effort -- life's too short to waste time like that.

But don't assume that the fact that something doesn't appeal to you straight away means it has no value at all. And if you don't want to make the effort to find its value, just admit that you don't want to make the effort. Don't make a half-assed attempt to get others to make the effort for you. That's just not cricket.