Just a Pilgrim

I finally checked out Volume 1 of the Scott Pilgrim series this weekend. I wanted to try it because I had heard so many good things about it, but I did not have high hopes. The style of it seemed very manga, and I have yet to find any manga that I am really interested in. I'm not saying that there isn't some very good manga out there - there is probably manga available that would have me running down the street singing its praises like a gibbering idiot. Its just that anything I've chanced across in the past has left me very cold. I also have to admit that it is very hard for me to read comics in a small digest format, because it isn't the "right" size for comics, having grown up reading American super-hero books and other stuff that is at least that size or bigger.

Nonetheless, I finally put my reservations aside and read it, and I'm glad I did. It was a very enjoyable book. There were a couple of parts that were a bit too cute and rang somewhat false (like Scott believing that somehow the CDs he ordered would arrive immediately, and the fact that he ordered said CDs with his roommates credit card info without protest), but other aspects of the book more than made up for it. I loved the dynamicism of the musical bits - O'Malley really nails them such that we can almost hear the music as we read the pages, an effect that has to be incredibly hard to pull off. Still, I was on the fence between "eh, its OK" and "yeah, this rocks" until the climactic fight scene. Up until that point, I had found it mostly funny and charming, but hadn't really detected anything exceptional to bring me back for more. The musical beatdown of Matthew Patel, however, displayed loads of originality and clinched it for me - now I am looking forward to picking up Volume 2 when I next set foot in my local comic shop, and reporting back on whether the Scott Pilgrim experiment continues to succeed after I've read it.