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.