SDCC Week: In 2004, Scott Pilgrim Reinvented Comics for a World Dominated by Video Games

SDCC Week: In 2004, Scott Pilgrim Reinvented Comics for a World Dominated by Video Games

Truly, the most precious of little lives.

When Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life arrived in book stores in 2004, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Sure, maybe none of its individual components felt profoundly new. But the way it deftly combined so many different disparate influences and concepts redefined what comic books—or rather, graphic novels—could be.

In some ways, Precious Little Life read like an action comic. The first volume ends with protagonist Scott Pilgrim facing off against his first of many rivals, Matthew Patel. But their showdown doesn’t take itself too seriously: The fight involves a chorus line of singing demonesses, and it ends with Matthew exploding into coins upon his defeat.

Maybe it would be better to describe Precious Little Life as a romance comic. Initially, college-age Scott indulges in an innocent-but-questionable flirtation with a smitten, wide-eyed high schooler by the improbable name of Knives Chau. He soon finds himself smitten in turn by a cool new girl in town, Ramona Flowers. All the action elements that come into play throughout the story’s course tie back to Scott’s infatuation with Ramona... and, occasionally, to Knives’ infatuation with Scott. But even if romance drives the book, Precious Little Life is much too funny, too violent, and too weird to slot tidily into the romance genre.

In other ways, Scott Pilgrim read like a manga. It wasn’t technically manga, of course, since its creator—Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley—didn’t hail from Japan. But it certainly had the look and feel of Japanese comics. Not just in its black-and-white print style, and not just in its dynamic layouts and energetic panels, but also in its heavy-yet-fluid line work that called to mind gag manga that prioritized personality and keen comedic timing over the meticulous visual perfection of something like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. Likewise, the book’s borderline-chaotic mixture of romance, action, and magical realism had a lot in common with classic 1980s action/gag manga like Ranma 1/2. Yet the story pacing and delivery of jokes felt decidedly western in style.

Scenes portrayed here may or may not depict actual events. © Oni Press / Bryan Lee O’Malley

Maybe Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life could better be described as a slice-of-life story. When the characters aren’t engaging in impossible fight sequences, they’re usually hanging out together: Practicing music at a friend’s place, going to parties hosted by the local gossip, dropping by the neighborhood dive to watch music, that sort of thing. Oh, and playing video games. And when they’re not playing video games, they’re defining their reality by them.

In fact, the video game element does a lot to define Scott Pilgrim’s place in the world. Fundamentally, the overall story—young slacker meets girl, young slacker loses girl, young slacker searches his soul to figure out how to get girl back (and spends lot of time hanging out with pals in between)—belongs to the long and storied tradition of teen/twentysomething dramas that hit it big in the ’80s with John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Those movies had diverged from the classic teen rebel films or Disney adventures of the 1950s-70s by greatly lowering the stakes of the drama to manageable levels. No one died, there were no hard life lessons relayed, and nothing was damaged outside of the occasional broken teenage heart. Those movies led to even lighter fare like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and High Fidelity, Cameron Crowe’s Singles, and Kevin Smith fare like Clerks.

In other words, Scott Pilgrim was an early ’00s interpretation of a Generation X staple, cast through an Xennial/Millennial lens. Video games play a crucial part in that reinvention. The hangout films of the ’80s and ’90s centered heavily redominantly around the idea of music as their generation’s shared language. Whether as a part of the texture of the film (as with The Breakfast Club’s iconic soundtrack), the anchor for a key moment (see: Say Anything and Peter Gabriel), or an object of obsession for the characters (a la Singles or Ghost World), pop songs defined the genre. And certainly some of that carried over into Scott Pilgrim! Not only did Scott and his friends play loudly and badly in their own garage band, Scott’s name itself is a reference to a song by indie rockers Plumtree.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life initially centers on music, like its predecessors, but its media-centrism shifts over the course of the volume until it wholly embraces video game influences. © Oni Press / Bryan Lee O’Malley

But if cool music was a primary character in something like High Fidelity, it was reduced to supporting cast status for Scott Pilgrim. Video games are as much his crew’s obsession as music—but even beyond that, Scott Pilgrim’s structure, logic, and key story elements all tie back into video games. Scott falls for Ramona when she uses his dreams as a “subspace” shortcut, a la Super Mario Bros. 2. The Seven Evil Exes Scott battles in order to prove his worthiness for Ramona’s affections are pure video game boss battles, with each victory awarding Scott cash, experience, skill perks, and even a 1UP. Game references abound in large ways and small, from  punk bands called “The Clash at Demonhead” and “Crash and the Boys” to the fact that Scott’s heavily embroidered memories of his awesome high school heroism are just straight up a retelling of River City Ransom’s plot.

The degree and fluidity with which author Bryan Lee O’Malley integrated video game references into Scott Pilgrim aren’t just a case of scoring cheap points with readers with easy “hey, remember that?” nostalgia. (Half the references in the book call back to extremely deep-cut back-catalog fare that many people these days only know about in the first place because of Scott Pilgrim.) Rather, it speaks to the growing importance of video games in that generation’s lives. When video game references popped up in 20th century media, it was almost always in the form of awkward “how do you do fellow kids” attempts to engage DOOM and Mortal Kombat fans with Pac-Man sound effects, or else as incidental scenery to establish a character as either a slacker or a hacker. See Ferris Bueller—well, Matthew Broderick. He played a mean round of Galaga in WarGames, but strictly to drive home to viewers the fact that he was kind of a layabout, but also good at computers.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life took a different tack. The game references (along with the music references and comic references) weren’t included as conspicuous signals for viewers. Rather, they casually emphasized the fact that Scott, his peers, his creator, and their audience all grew up immersed in that media. It was next-generation storytelling: a work by, for, and about a generation who grew up bombarded by all forms of media at all moments and navigated the world by looking to those works for guidance. A different meaning for the expression “pop culture references”, in other words: not so much “a reference to that thing” as “they use that thing as a point of reference.”

All that’s missing is a chance to pluck coins from the ground and spin a one-armed bandit. © Oni Press / Bryan Lee O’Malley

In that sense, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life was the mass-market form of the internet comics scene that began to emerge in the late 1990s. Webcomics (mostly) began as traditional three- or four-panel gag constructs like Sluggy Freelance or Penny Arcade, but they began to take on more open-ended approaches with less reliance on the newspaper-standard setup-setup-punchline structure as the audience grew. The wildly popular (by early internet standards) Megatokyo fully embodied that format, quickly shifting from an online comic strip in the American tradition to page-based layouts inspired by Japanese manga. Projects like Questionable Content and Real Life centered on young adults hanging out and sometimes saying funny or pithy things but mostly just having relationships. And very nearly all of these publication treated the existence of video games as a given—not something to conspicuously build a story around, but rather as a simple, accepted part of the culture shared by characters, creators, and readers.

And why wouldn’t they? By 2004, 100 million people owned a PlayStation. Lara Croft went on tour (virtually) with U2. Pokémon had been dominating the charts and airwaves for more than half a decade. There were bands that covered video game music, people who made a name for themselves entirely on finishing old video games incredibly fast, conventions about video games, and a cable network dedicated to video game news and reviews. Scott Pilgrim was the first major published work not only to genuinely treat gaming’s growing ubiquity as a matter of fact but to fully embrace it—all while telling a funny, quirky, and eventually self-reflective coming-of-age story.

Ah—that’s what Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life was. Not a manga, not an action comic, not a romance. Yes, it was all of those things, but ultimately it was a coming-of-age tale. And its characters grew up in an age defined not just by movies, TV, and music, but by video games, too. No wonder it made for such great video game adaptations.