Comic Talk #7

Recently a fellow Weekend staffer lent me the first volume of “Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life.” I did what I always do when someone tries to make me borrow their manga: I awkwardly tried to avoid accepting it, finally caved, then made no plans of reading it.

But alas, I needed an idea for a column, and the storyline seemed interesting enough, so my exposure to a comic book style that I had never given a chance to began.

“Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life” isn’t strictly manga in that it’s actually Canadian, not Japanese. In fact, beyond the artwork, it has little in common with the traditional form. The script is full of Canadian idiosyncrasies and nods to Western pop culture, and, thankfully, it reads front to back.

Still, as an avid reader of traditional superhero-style comic books, the art is very difficult to swallow at times. The people don’t really look like people. I don’t mean to say that, say, Superman looks like a real person either, but us westerners have conditioned ourselves to think he does. These bug-eyed, contour-void individuals are difficult to look at.

Then there’s the issue of color. In traditional comics, the job of the colorist is as important as that of the artist. The palette that he uses ultimately defines the tone of the comic. “Scott Pilgrim” has no color, just black ink on newspaper-gray pages.

The smaller page size is also difficult to handle. Manga is about the same size as your average Stephen King paperback, and that’s very jarring for comic book traditionalists.

The writing, however, isn’t bad at all. It’s smart, funny, and fast-paced, and it’s easy to see why there’s going to be a film adaptation starring Michael Cera. Author Bryan Lee O’Malley knows his way around the written word, and in a different format, this is probably something I would anxiously await new issues of on Wednesdays.

I didn’t hate “Scott Pilgrim,” but I won’t continue to read it, and I won’t read any other manga in the foreseeable future. O’Malley made a valiant effort to combine a traditionally Japanese format with English-speaking sensibilities, but the entire art form is at odds with traditional comic books from a visual standpoint.

Still, the lesson to take away from this is that I read something that I didn’t think I would like and didn’t totally hate it.
I survived.