It was a dark and stormy night, and I decided to continue my Annotated Pilgrim series with some more of Volume 2. The rest of Vol. 2 will follow eventually. I got through a little more than this, but I thought I should quit while I'm ahead.

I'm thinking of printing up the annotations from Vol. 1 and 2 and offering them as a sort of minicomic zine thing at APE and MoCCA this spring, hopefully with added art and possibly short comics.

Previous installments are here.

VOLUME 2: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

PART 2


No-Account Video (cont'd)
Hollie is another character (like Julie) who was made up on the fly just to fill a vacancy, but is becoming more important as the story goes on. In the script I describe her as "a slightly older semi-hipster girl with black hair who looks pretty with-it." I keep her around because I like drawing her, even though she's inconsistently designed (like Julie!), but also because her gay roommate Joseph is fun to write and is popular with the kids.

Looking at it now, there is some weird stuff tossed into the background of the video store. Magazines called SUCK, CHEW, BOTH, WOOL and SAUCE? The weirdest made-up video cover in there is JEWEL, THE MOVIE. (I guess this is about the pop singer? It seems to be in the horror section. Ho ho ho.)

Anyway, other than that, I think the video store bit is the most half-assed scene in the book. My inking started to improve shortly afterwards.

Second Cup, training, and afterwards
I think this is the first time I used the Second Cup as a location (they're like the Starbucks of Canada, by way of explanation). I scouted the one near my apartment at the time, and as I started drawing the book it went into renovations and I couldn't even get inside to see what the hell it looked like! So anyway, the interior is kind of totally made-up, and next time I draw it I'll probably try to make it better.

In that scene is a cameo of me and Hope Larson at the bar (apparently my hair was long and hers was short), and also Kean Soo off to the side (he is largely hairless). Side note: their nametags really do say "Coffee Agent", and Stacey (the real one, my sister) did work at a Second Cup for a while, but not this particular location.

Lucas Lee's movie "Let's Hope There's A Heaven" is named after a Plumtree song, as is the movie he's filming in town, "You Just Don't Exist". The shot on the TV is like... he's holding a pistol and a badge, and there's a girl in a swimsuit over there? I guess the idea is that he's in lousy movies?

This is one of the few scenes where Wallace acts as Scott's "trainer". That was originally going to be more of a thing, but I kept downplaying it and now it's just little bits here and there. Oh, and during this scene Scott is wearing a Wigu shirt (well, a shirt that says "Wigu"), and I managed to misspell it in the very first panel.

Afterwards, we see that the moon has two holes in it, which is setup for a really out-there joke in Volume 3; I'm kind of surprised I planned it this early.

Knives comes by
This little scene (Knives calling Wallace from the front step) was inspired by one of my roommates' ex-girlfriends, who did similarly weird stuff after they broke up. There were originally going to be more stalkerish scenes, but I consolidated it down.

Scott and Ramona hang out
There's a lot going on in the movie-watching scene. It's one of my favourites in the book, and possibly my favourite Scott/Ramona scene in the series to date. I like how she's interested in Lucas getting it on with the chick so they can see his butt.

The movie is a weird dreamlike mishmash of the flashback earlier in the volume and weird action-movie stuff. The stilted dialogue is my lame parody of "typical comic-book dialogue", with lots of errant emphases (and could also stand in for "bad acting"). The girl looks like Knives for whatever reason (and wields a knife), and the bad guy has like a crazy hat on or something?

I don't know what the hell is going on with Scott's parents. At this point (in Volume 2, I mean) they're kind of an un-thought-out facet of the story.

I'm fond of the part where he's flossing and she's Q-tipping her ear. It's easy to forget about mundane things like that when you're drawing a comic, so it's always satisfying when I manage to squeeze in some dental floss between the important dialogue and action.

Vegan Shepherd's Pie
People talk to me about this scene all the time, which I guess is good? It grew out of my musings on what you could do in comics that you couldn't do in, like, film or whatever. It has to do with the printed page – stuff you can linger on, kids' games, diagrams and other practical applications of having something written down in front of you.

My friends and I used to have cooking nights like this once in a while, collaborating on the prep and enjoying the dinner later. Since my friend Joel is a pretty good cook (last I heard, he's applying to culinary school) we had some fancy ones, but I ended up using my own (boring) shepherd's pie recipe.

I based the original recipe on something out of Nigella Lawson's How to Eat, with enough modifications that I didn't see the need to credit her. I really liked shepherd's pie when I was a kid, but it's full of beef, so I hadn't eaten it in a while. I made this version a few times to try and feed it to Hope, and I wanted to put a recipe in the book and this was the most straightforward thing.

Knives dyes her hair
Hipster girls with a swash of red hair were pretty common as I was doing this book, but it's also kind of psycho, so it works on multiple levels for good ol' Knives Chau. I dyed my hair a few times in my teens and early twenties, so I didn't even have to do any research for this scene! The dialogue is something I'm proud of, because I think it gets a bit deeper into Knives' mind than we'd previously been, but in an indirect, funny way.

The night before Lucas Lee
So Ramona gets a cat, probably just because I wanted to draw a cat. I think for this scene I originally just had Ramona sarcastically saying "do you want me to make you a list?" or something, but decided it would be funnier if she skipped that and just went ahead and made a list. Hope hated the apartment we lived in at the time – it was a basement thing and, while not as bad as Scott and Wallace's place, in hindsight it was pretty awful. So I think this came out of that.

Ramona's "I remember there being a lot of drama" line was stolen from Chris Butcher. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was some snarky thing about a school maybe being a theater school and then an artful pause and then a zinger about how there was a lot of drama at this particular school.

Casa Loma
So, the story of Casa Loma is that our cruddy basement apartment was just a few blocks away from the castle. I'd been there as a kid, and I knew they filmed some of X-MEN there, but one day we went for a walk and they were filming this Hilary Duff movie THE PERFECT MAN. We didn't see any famous people or anything, we just thought it was kind of funny. So I filed that one away, and that was the inspiration for this scene.

(In a strange twist of fate, when Universal purchased the option for Scott Pilgrim, the production company that set it up was Marc Platt Productions, who also produced THE PERFECT MAN. In another twist of fate, that same Hilary Duff movie used some Oni Press comics in the background of a scene, possibly including some of mine? I haven't actually seen it.)

Anyway, Winifred Hailey was supposed to be like a pseudo-Hilary Duff, while Lucas Lee is kind of an amalgamation of Jason Lee and Luke Wilson, I guess (but, uh, an egotistical douche?). He was visually based on my old comic store owner, but changed when I actually started inking him. Inking his beard and hair was hard and annoying.

Oh, in this scene Scott is wearing a SARS t-shirt, which is visually based on the SARU shirts from the manga Tokyo Tribes, but of course says SARS, which is a disease that infamously plagued Toronto in 2003.

The real stairs at Casa Loma would be impossible to skate, even in fantasy-land, because they are segmented and have natural skate-stoppers. I simplified them in the comic and made it theoretically possible. I really like how the skating scene turned out. I sweated bullets over how to draw an ollie, for example. I'm not a skater; the whole "I should have picked that proficiency in grade 5" thing is definitely how I feel. I tried to pick up skateboarding in my early 20s, but the first time I fell down and busted my drawing hand was the day I quit. I'm not so good at the balance thing, so I'm better off on the ground.