Today I sat in a conference room on the Universal lot for six hours.

Edgar took me through every page of all four Scott Pilgrims and asked me if every visual thing was a reference or homage, or if I made it up myself. Basically, I had some 'splainin' to do.

See, in the movie business, they have to get clearance rights for all these little teeny things that nobody's too worried about me doing in the comic books.

I guess there's a difference between a crappy black and white drawing of a brand name and a giant cinema-screen-sized moving photograph of a brand name.

Afterwards, I cured my ills by lolling around my hotel bed for a while, then going to the mall and buying some manga and quasi-healthy fast food.

The mall didn't have Tezuka's DORORO (vol 1 of which was just released). So sad. They did have copies of all four Scott Pilgrims, though, which was unusual.

I wish I had stopped by Meltdown on my way back from Universal. Maybe tomorrow.

If I can survive until midnight, I am going to see IRON MAN with some of the fellows. If I can survive to the end of IRON MAN, I will come back to my hotel room and sleep. Beautiful sleep.

Awards season: I've been nominated for a National Cartoonist Society "Reuben" Award, in the Comic Books category, for Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together. This is astonishing. Recent winners in this category: JEFF SMITH, DON PERLIN, ALEX ROSS, CHRIS WARE, DAN DeCARLO, FRANK CHO, STAN SAKAI, TERRY MOORE, DARWYN COOKE, PAUL CHADWICK. This is big, scary stuff. Will Eisner won, like, eight of these things.

Movie stuff: Michael Cera gushes a little here.

How I Met Michael Cera: Mr Edgar Wright, his brother Oscar, cowriter Michael Bacall and I met up in Toronto in June 2007. We were talking about the script, I was showing them the original locations, etcetera. We went to the CN Tower and then we met with Michael Cera. We ate sushi and saw Live Free Or Die Hard. (When you hang out with Edgar Wright, you will be watching movies.) I was passing around some pages from Vol 4 while we waited for the movie to come on. The Superbad trailer played, and people around us were like "oh my god it's that guy".

Anyway, that's all. Since then, I think he's been making movies like every single day. And the casting took a year to go from a gleam in Edgar's eye to an on-paper reality.

Also, all my pictures from that Toronto trip are like, neighbourhood cats and funny signs. I have not once in my life taken a picture of Edgar Wright or anyone else involved with the film, mostly due to oversight on my part.

Movie news: I guess Universal publicists put in an update at IMDB. Now it says the title is SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, which I must tell you is the accurate current title of the film. It may change in the future, but I'm pretty sure every draft I've seen has had that title on it.

I think it's an appropriate title for a done-in-one version of the story, don't you?

Anime: I watched that first episode of Macross Frontier, which I guess debuted in December (the full series begins in Japan later this week). It was awesome. Really. I was impressed. It got me unexpectedly excited. I've always liked Macross/Robotech... stories about huge numbers of people drifting in space do something for me, I guess. (I got it here.)

Video games: I started playing Etrian Odyssey (for DS), which I had been hyped about back when it was announced, but then I forgot about it! Anyway, it's pretty cool so far, in a curiously Eye of the Beholder-kinda way, but with adorable character art.

Music: I am rediscovering Daft Punk's Human After All, which most of us dismissed back in '05. Somehow it has improved with age (and with the release of Alive 2007, not to mention the Justice album). Good inking music, maybe.

Books: We are listening to Into the Wild in audiobook format, speaking of inking music. I haven't seen the movie, although I agree that Emile Hirsch is handsome. The book is pretty good. Somehow we keep listening to books about Man's Folly.

We ended up having a good time (oops?).

Day 1: travel. When we got in (dinnertime), we found out that the casting of Michael Cera had been announced and people were abuzz. Pure coincidence. We had dinner with some of the boys from Oni, who were in town for other stuff, and also with some Hollywood Producer Guys and Mr Edgar Wright. It was loud, but fun, and the food and wine were excellent (Tasca, Eric Gitter's favourite place, I guess - he's our Oni Press Hollywood Producer Guy).

Day 2: we hung out with some friends (Nick and Emily, who are on livejournal but I don't know how to do the name-link thing), and ate at the 101 Coffee Shop. I had the thursday fried chicken special. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures of all my food the entire trip. We also visited Michael Bacall (screenwriter to watch) at his awesome house.

Day 3: went to Little Tokyo, ate some cheap/good sushi at Zencu, browsed Kinokuniya and bought a couple things, picked up some Japanese snacks at the market (pancake cookies, green tea meltyblends, mochi, american coffee), shopped at American Apparel, took a meeting, and then went out to a dinner that I can't even begin to explain, so I won't.

Day 4: exhausted already! Went for a swim in the morning. Dropped my phone in the pool (it showed signs of life for a while, but I don't think it's going to make it). Went to Meltdown, made a huge stack of books to buy after the signing. Ate sandwiches at Abbot's Habit (down the street from the comic store and very good). Signed nonstop from roughly 1:30 to 3:30. Sold some art. Bought the pile of books. Went out to dinner with Bacall at a cheapy Mexican place that I won't mention because we got made fun of for going there for the rest of the weekend. Almost went to a movie, then didn't.

Day 5: Had breakfast (poolside! at the Standard!) with Adam and his wife. I dunno about the rest of you, but our experiences with Hollywood Producer Guys have been strangely awesome. All our producers are awesome Ivy League geniuses, not the caricatured dum-dums you might expect. We really like them and would hang out with them any time, even if they weren't Hollywood Producer Guys.

We mostly took it easy the rest of the day - ended up going to the beach with Nick, toodling around the closed mall (easter sunday) and then we finally did go to a movie that night, Drillbit Taylor, which was awful (but we still love Owen Wilson).

Day 6: had lunch with Edgar (the Standard again, but inside this time), went to Universal (exciting! but didn't see any famous people), chatted about movie stuff. Jared (a Yale man, see?) took us around the studio on a golf cart. We got in trouble with security when we tried to drive by the Back to the Future clock tower. Then we dragged him out to dinner at Chosun Galbee, which I'd been waiting for all week, and we had a ridiculous quantity of bulgogi and stuff.

Then we came back!!! The trip back was horrible and Logan Int'l (Boston) is my new pick for "worst major airport ever".

I took down my last two posts - I don't want to sound like I'm being a negative creep about this movie thing. I get easily ticked-off by lazy, ill-informed Internet Opinions (tm), but I'll try to chill.

It's exciting, sometimes fun, generally weird, often confusing. We get to hang out with people like Edgar Wright, which is many a nerd's dream, I'm sure. And we got treated like Important People for a few days, about which I cannot complain.

The Hollywood Reporter prints a story hastily sent in by someone's publicist. Nobody fact-checks anything. The rest of the internet / world hastily copies the facts in the article into their own hastily-published articles. It's amazing!

Anyway, I can "confirm" that Michael Cera is going to play Scott Pilgrim in this movie adaptation.

It is not called "Scott Pilgrim's Little Life", as the whole internet has been saying. Gee, I wonder why they took out "precious", the internet wonders? Maybe because some idiot made an error while filing the story? No, couldn't be. There must be some deeper meaning.

It isn't even called Precious Little Life, but I defer to the film's creators as to when and how they want to make their announcements.

Yes, there is a screenplay (sorry, imdb). I can tell you that I read the first draft in March 2006, and the second draft was submitted in October, just before the writer's strike. Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright co-wrote it. Edgar Wright is directing the film.

Any script reviews you've seen online were probably of the first (2006) draft.

Yes, the studio (Universal) is "eyeing a fall start".

Yes, it is based on the entire story arc, not just the first book, and yes we talked a lot about what should happen in the later parts of the story, but at the same time we have already diverged significantly. It is a complimentary story, not an exact copy.

Yes, Edgar Wright is a fine fellow who has included me since the very start (late '04 / early '05).

Blah, blah, blah.

I honestly had no idea this was going to be announced this week. I am in LA for no reason connected to this movie thing. We just came out here for fun!

As I am Unimportant, I seriously doubt many people care what I have to say on this subject, but there you have it. The truth as it stands, for my readers.

--

Reminder: I am signing at Meltdown tomorrow from 2-4 PM. Los Angeles.

I put a new song on my purevolume page. It's a demo of this one song that i've been messing with for a few months. I played it at MoCCA if anyone was at that party thing where i played some songs or whatever. It's called Don't let the archons get you down. i guess it's about dealing with the perils of being alive and how you should try to enjoy yourself even though everything is extremely shitty.

I also noticed that they put up a two-part Hot Fuzz Comic-Con Video Blog, which might entertain you.

Just noticed this one, a little interview with Edgar Wright where they kind of tricked him into talking about Scott Pilgrim a bit, on CHUD.com, here. This is the most he's said about it publicly, which is kind of exciting! woooooOOooOOOOo! (The interviewer, Devin Faraci, also interviewed me at MoCCA and is a really nice guy. I also communicated with him telepathically at this really loud fabulous party in San Diego, telepathy being the only method of communication available at the time.)

The last Hot Fuzz video blog finally went up. If you missed them, you can watch them all in a row now and your head will spin! They're pretty silly, but entertaining if you know/like/stalk those guys. Edgar Wright and Nick Frost will be at Comic-Con International (San Diego) premiering some actual Hot Fuzz footage next Sunday, apparently.

(Edgar Wright is going to turn Scott Pilgrim into a movie if I have anything to say about it)

I just noticed they wrote a new synopsis of Hot Fuzz, so I'll post it here for posterity.

Top London cop, Police Constable Nicholas Angel, finds himself reassigned to the sleepy West Country village of Sandford. With garden fetes and neighbourhood watch meetings replacing the action of the city, Angel struggles to adapt to his situation and finds himself partnered with Danny Butterman, an oafish but well meaning young Constable. Just as all seems lost, a series of grisly accidents motivates Angel into action. Convinced of foul play, Angel realises that Sandford may not be as idyllic as it seems.

For those tracking film stuff, our friend Edgar Wright's current picture HOT FUZZ has an in-progress website at Working Title, complete with the promise of continuing video blogs. One video blog is up there now. IT'S THE FUTURE!



For those NOT keeping score, Edgar Wright is also working with Michael Bacall on a possible future SCOTT PILGRIM film, which, sadly, I can't really talk about. Ha ha ha! I can confirm that the film is still unconfirmed, but we should find out more official news by May.