Ladies’ Man

From Bryan Lee O‘Malley’s Scott Pilgrim one-shot, available for free from ComiXology.

Stumbling Through Scott Pilgrim?

Back in July, Bryan Lee O’Malley posted one page from the third volume of his Scott Pilgrim epic on his website under the label “what not to do.” Specifically, what not to do in laying out panels and word balloons on a comics page.

As this counterexample from his fifth volume shows, a page can have a complex design but still provide the readers with a clear path from one panel and balloon to the next.

I think O’Malley was being too hard on himself in suggesting that the bottom of the earlier page doesn’t work. The balloon placement and characters’ eyelines strike me as setting out the proper visual path. Maybe the balloon over Wallace’s head could be a little lower so the reader’s eye doesn’t trip over it while moving down from the middle tier, but that’s it.

But the top half—what to do with the top? How to keep readers along the intended path (marked in red) and not following momentum and the direction of Wallace’s look to the big panel on the right, which should actually come last? This must be why most comics manuals recommend against trying to stack panels in a left-hand column alongside a tall panel on the right—though one can find plenty of successful examples of just that. Perhaps even some in Scott Pilgrim.

Mythologizing Toronto

Yesterday I started quoting from Chris Randle’s interview with Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim books. Late in the conversation they get deep into the meaning of Toronto:

BLO’M: I can tell you my new metaphorical structure for the book [vol. 6, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour], based on last year. Gideon is Edgar [Wright, movie director], and I’m Envy [local girl who’s been made into a singing star]. He came back to town and started this whole industry, and gave people jobs, and pushed everything around to feed ourselves. I was just kind of along for the ride. So yeah, I feel like in this book I identified most with Envy Adams, which is truly disturbing. . . .

I was gonna do a promo strip for the book that was…all these Toronto luminaries gushing about Gideon coming to town…It was gonna be, like, Chris Murphy and all that kind of stuff.

CR: Margaret Atwood.

BLO’M: Margaret Atwood [laughs]. People saying what a genius he is and stuff. I should still do that, it’d be fun. . . .

CR: I’m really interested to see how Toronto reacts to it specifically, because – I think Scott Pilgrim is part of the general comics zeitgeist in this past decade, maybe the representative series from what a younger generation of North Americans are doing. But also I think it was part of a smaller local thing in Toronto, starting around 2002 or 2003…celebrating or mythologizing [the city].

BLO’M: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of accidentally was in the right place at the right time. People always ask me about Toronto, what it is about Toronto, questions like that, and I’ve never really had a statement. I guess Scott Pilgrim is my statement on Toronto. I don’t think it’s conclusive in any way, but…I only lived there for three, four years. I just happened to be there. I was nobody. It was really weird to go back last year and be introduced to Chris Murphy and Broken Social Scene and all those guys, to have them be like: “Where did you hang out? Why didn’t we know you?” Because I was a fucking nerdy cartoonist! That’s why you didn’t know me, I’m not a rock star.

CR: [laughs] That’s great. I think it’s because Toronto is a really big city, but one that didn’t – I mean, it’s not like New York, where there’s whole layers of lore…

BLO’M: It doesn’t have that weird history, that mythologized history that New York has or L.A. . . . I’ve always been intimidated by New York for that reason, because there’s too many stories. It’s been [so] fictionalized that I can’t really comprehend it.

CR: And L.A., in a different sense, the glitzy sense. But Toronto didn’t have – it had boring, conservative Protestantism…

BLO’M: Conservative white people, yeah.

CR: But there was all this raw material.

BLO’M: Yeah, and I feel like I’ve maybe unfairly mythologized Toronto. I’ve definitely seen kids being like: “I want to move to Canada now!” And, um…it’s cool, but it’s just a city.

Is it perhaps characteristically Canadian to feel guilty about making a big, cosmopolitan city look like an interesting place to live?

I feel compelled to tell a story about Honest Ed’s, a Toronto landmark that serves as a major setting in the third Scott Pilgrim volume. Honest Ed’s is a discount and salvage store that looks like a cross between the old Spag’s, the Corn Palace, and a Las Vegas casino. It’s garish and commercial and more than faintly embarrassing. Scott actually needs goggles when he’s inside.

But when I read that scene, I remembered a secret about Honest Ed’s. When my first book was being published, the head of the press told me that firm’s landlord was Honest Ed. He liked having publishers, galleries, and other cultural institutions in the neighborhood, so he gave them good rates on office space. That garish, commercial embarrassment was actually a pillar of Toronto’s art scene.

So what does that say about Toronto? There are plenty of stories under its surface. The real myth of Toronto might be its “boring, conservative Protestantism.”

They Don’t Teach Subspace in Canadian Schools

One aspect of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books that I haven’t seen discussed enough is their Canadianness. Not just that the series was started and set in Toronto, and how most of its characters are Canadian, but how it depicts that city and the great nation surrounding it.

Of course, the American media wouldn’t take notice of that quality. And even the Canadian entertainment media skips that stuff mostly. But when Canadian comics journalist Chris Randle gets to publish the unprinted portions of his Toronto Globe & Mail interview with O’Malley on his blog, then it all comes out!

CR: The fact that Gideon opens up his sinister, decadent lair, his Legend of Zelda boss lair, at—

BLO’M: At this homeless shelter.

CR: Yeah, the corner with all the junkies and homeless people at Queen & Bathurst! It plays into all those debates about gentrification, and…

BLO’M: Yeah, totally. And Gideon is, you know, this American guy coming to town and making his own luxury bullshit…

That combination of awe and resentment toward America surfaces in volume 1 when Ramona Flowers brings Scott his Amazon.ca package. He asks how she was in his dream.

Ramona mentions the subspace highway through Scott’s head. “Is this something they don’t teach in Canadian schools?” she asks. “You guys probably just don’t know about them in Canada. I was wondering why they were always so empty up here.”

To which Scott can only reply, “So…um, I guess you’re American?”

Because who else would have such a casual attitude toward awesome power and other people’s space? Roller-skating through Scott’s dreams isn’t just a metaphor for a boy becoming infatuated with a girl. At that moment it also becomes a synedoche for how Canada views its southern neighbor.

But there’s hope for Ramona yet. In volume 6, she’s disappeared. Everyone assumes she’s gone back to Gideon (i.e., America). But at the end she reveals ***yeah, yeah, SPOILER*** that she went to her dad’s on a sort of “wilderness sabbatical”—just as Wallace and Kim told Scott to do. In other words, she’s become a little more Canadian.

TOMORROW: Toronto, city of myth.

The Scott Pilgrim Movie Spoiled

The movie adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics novel offers a curious lesson. Some scenes are recreated almost exactly, particularly from the first four volumes. But toward the end the movie departs so much from the original that I found it undercut the very themes it was trying to get across. (And speaking of “the end,” be assured that this posting contains SPOILERS.)

Writer-director Edgar Wright made the movie even as O’Malley completed his graphic saga, and the plots diverge more and more as the stories unfold. It’s possible that the screenplay reflects what O’Malley was planning in the middle of his project. Or it might reflect the different sensibility of Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall. A big factor, I’m sure, were the requirements of movie storytelling.

The books take place over many months; the movie compresses the same core story into about a single week. We thus lose the cycle of seasons, the Canadian wilderness retreats, the band’s prolonged attempt to record an album. There’s too little time for Scott Pilgrim’s Big Steps—getting a job, moving into an apartment of his own (albeit paid for by his parents). While that compressed timeframe changes the tenor of the story, however, it doesn’t change its essence.

In one respect, I thought the movie made more of a narrative element than the books. The extra life Scott wins in volume 3 becomes not just a way to survive Gideon’s attack in volume 6, but also a chance for Scott to make things right to his friends, à la Groundhog Day. He gets to play level 7 all over again.

Other changes had diminishing returns. A lot of the secondary characters’ stories had to be sliced away. We don’t see, for example, Stephen Stills at work in the kitchen, recording with Joseph, breaking up with Julie, and so on. [Hey, I’m not spoiling everything.] Such compression is common in adapting novels for the big screen. Alas, the effect of this cutting means fewer reminders that a lot of life goes on around Scott while he doesn’t notice.

The screenplay’s second significant narrative change is to make Scott’s decisions more crucial to how scenes are resolved. In volume 3, Todd loses his vegan powers because he’s an arrogant rock star who never gave up gelato. It’s just a happy coincidence that the vegan police arrive when Todd’s about to finish Scott off. That may seem like a narrative defect, but Scott’s precious little life is founded on happy coincidences that he thinks he deserves.

In contrast, the movie Todd’s powers are taken away after the movie Scott tricks him into drinking coffee with half and half. The book Scott would need a lot longer than a week to come up with such a cunning plan, and would never be able to control his thoughts so effectively.

As another example, Young Neil’s big moment arrives not because Scott blithely drops the “Young” from his name, but because he takes over the bass guitar—he becomes a new Scott Pilgrim. Then Scott overtly declares that from now on the lad will be known as “Neil.”

Only in the movie does main villain Gideon offer the band Sex Bob-Omb a recording contract. That’s an obvious ploy to control them, and Scott alone refuses to sign. The other band members get shrunk into foils for the hero, whereas in the books they’re usually more grounded than he is.

The major characters who suffer most from the changes are Scott’s old girlfriends. Kim Pine loses her best moments in volumes 5 and 6. Knives Chau shows up to help Scott in his final fight (turning a couple’s moment into a threesome), and then dutifully sends him off after his new girlfriend. Envy Adams never makes her curtain call at the Chaos Theatre.

In other words, the movie has become All About Scott. Yet its stated theme, as in the books, is that Scott has to recognize that the world isn’t All About Scott. During the climactic fight in the volume 6, Scott gains the Power of Understanding. At the equivalent moment in the movie, he gains the Power of Self-Respect. But Scott Pilgrim already had more Self-Respect than he deserved.

Toward the end of both books and movie, Nega-Scott shows up—the embodiment of all the evil Scott has unthinkingly done. In the books, Scott must absorb Nega-Scott, accepting the reality of his past behavior. In the movie, Nega-Scott turns out to be “a nice guy.” That’s just wrong.

All told, the changes to Scott Pilgrim combine to produce a smaller, more focused story, appropriate to a two-hour commercial movie—yet a story that ends up working against itself.

Edgar Wright Gets It Together

Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World offers delightful cinematic storytelling. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed simply watching a film unspool as much since, well, Edgar Wright’s last movie, Hot Fuzz.

As critic Douglas Wolk noted in this roundtable, the movie resembles Run, Lola, Run in its kinetic energy and willingness to bend the visual medium to tell its story. A very different story, of course—no bank robberies, but several examples of alternate ways things could happen.

Scott Pilgrim’s visual aesthetic combines elements of:

• videogames, with onscreen status updates.
• comics, with sound effects, labels, and captions “showing the invisible,” as well as lots of split screens to evoke panels.
• slapstick comedy, both silent and screwball types.

Michael Cera may play up Scott Pilgrim’s nebbishy cluelessness rather than his straight cluelessness, but he got so much right about the character’s blithe egotism—not Cera’s usual character by any means. The movie also makes clear, probably even clearer than in the books, that Scott’s friends are on to him. They know he’s barely holding onto loveable loser status, especially since he sees himself as more loveable and less of a loser than he really is.

As for the supporting cast, in reading reviews, I was struck by how different critics singled out different performances (once they got past praising Kieran Culkin’s Wallace). Each believed a distinct set of actors stole their scenes. There was a big divide about female lead Elizabeth Winstead; one review found her portrayal empty while another said she had exactly the mysterious allure that the role called for. I thought she was just fine, though the character wasn’t as full as in the books.

I particularly liked Brandon Routh, just as I liked him on Chuck last year. As with George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Dean Cain, Routh’s career was changed forever when he was cast as Superman. But unlike those other actors, his movie wasn’t a hit, saddling him with both typecasting and taint. Perhaps as a result, Routh keeps getting roles as too-handsome, too-capable guys that you want to hate. And he keeps knocking his line readings into the next solar system.

All that said, I thought this Scott Pilgrim movie ended up undercutting its own themes because of the moviemakers’ storytelling choices. Much more about that tomorrow.

Had to Find Other Ways to Waste My Time

Despite my birthdate, I’ve never gotten into video games. At least, not since I enjoyed a simple Star Trek game that worked like Battleship with photon torpedos. That was in the late 1970s, I believe; my mom was bringing home an early Apple with a shoebox modem to work on her second bachelor’s.

Once that fun was over, however, I never spent an afternoon loading quarters into an arcade machine. I never owned any home system. I helped a friend get through one challenge in Myst, and then lost interest. I like sudoku and solitaire on my handheld, but those are simply paperless versions of the original.

Last month Godson showed me a version of Lego Batman on a handheld device. The particular challenge engrossing him at that moment involved running around Wayne Manor hitting things so they turned into checkers pieces. (I suppose those are Lego coins.) Robin tagged along, every so often hopping back out of Batman’s way. I silently lamented the lack of character development.

Given all that, I might seem like a poor candidate to enjoy Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series and the new movie adaptation. Those stories reflect the outlook of a young man whose view has been colored by videogame pixels, so he thinks of life in character ratings (“awesome”), challenge levels, fights, and prizes.

But the details of Scott’s worldview aren’t hard to figure out. And its fundamentals are similar what we see in the story of Walter Mitty, Catherine Morland, or Don Quixote. All those characters try to view their worlds through the screen of some shiny, scary new storytelling form. And their basic narrative journeys all involve discovering what’s real about life, and what’s real about themselves. The rest is detail.

Once Again, Everything Comes Back to Oz

Will is, of course, what Dorothy provides for her courage-, heart-, and brains-seeking companions. Just as Ramona Flowers does for Scott Pilgrim.

Why, Yes, I Am Looking Forward to One Summer Movie

But tomorrow I have to finish the reading first.