BOOKS REVIEWS
6
For anyone who has ever loved playing a videogame, has been strangely infatuated with a film franchise, or had dreams of becoming a world renowned star of a rock and roll band, Scott Pilgrim would seem familiar to you and this series of graphic novels is something you will definitely love.
Scott is a 23 year old living in Toronto, Canada. He dates a 17 year old Chinese Highschooler and lives with his gay roommate, Wallace. He plays bass every night with his band “The sex bob-omb’s” and describes himself as “in between jobs”. From the external point of view of any graphic literature fan it seems like this is standard cliche protagonist material and nothing more but delving a little deeper into the books and you find that he has the “unique” task of defeating the girl of his dreams’ (literally) 7 evil ex’s in order to be able to go out with her.
So the plot sounds far fetched and unrealistic, but that's what series creator Bryan O’Malley was going for when he created a cast of original characters unmatched by any in film or TV.
The Scott Pilgrim Graphic novels
Book Review
By Oisin Englefield
Despite the first book in the series not directly focusing on Scott himself the entire time but rather seeing him as a way to push the plot forward and being a source of comedy relief, O’Malley is able to make every other character in his novels intriguing through his intelligent writing and visual style.
comic book. The black and white colour scheme hardly takes away from the immersion the reader experiences when reading these novels. Even when the debatably best character in the book Ramona changes the colour of her hair, not only does the reader not care and chooses to assume what it would be from the change in shading, but the book makes an active effort to show they understand this by having sections that actively reference the characters seeing colour and having fourth wall breaks to make fun of the colour scheme being experienced by the reader.
Despite this review needing to be short I would like to think I was able to communicate my feelings towards this hilarious and epic series of books that shaped the way comics are made and how despite comic artists wanting to be taken seriously, it could be achieved by being just a bit funny.