The Portland Mercury interviewed me last week prior to our signing. Whittled down to three questions. Easily digestible. Go for it.

I am interviewed by Sean T. Collins. Note: there is at least one Vol. 4 spoiler in the interview.

This interview makes me sound not half-bad, for the most part. Originally it was going to be in Wizard, but they fired him (boo). So now it's on Mister Internet.

SCOTT PILGRIM GETS IT TOGETHER may appear on some shipping lists for next week, but my official street date is NOVEMBER 14th. If anyone finds it on the 7th, let me know.

A nice little interview w/ me on Broken Frontier here. We did this one on tape in the back room at the Oni booth during San Diego.

I joined this thing called VOX, which I may play with a bit in the coming days. It's like an amalgamation of a livejournal-type-thing and flickr and some other crap, plus you can upload songs, so it might be worth a damn. It's hard to tell right now.

Hopefully I'll squeeze out another Painter painting later on. Thanks for the luv on the other ones.

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.)

I did an interview with a guy from the student paper at my old school, the University of Western Ontario. In it, the thrilling tale of how I am a terrible role-model. Relying on sheer luck is probably not a good life plan, everyone.

I just penciled a really great and hilarious page. Gotta keep it up! Man, these books have so many pages...

The current Publishers Weekly has an article on Young Cartoonists, and thanks to Heidi MacDonald I ended up in there! I thought it was gonna be about a whole whack of people, but it turns out it's just me, Raina Telgemeier, Lauren Weinstein and Jeffrey Brown. I kind of feel like the "one of these things is not like the other" of that bunch, but I do hope the article brings some meager quantity of respectability with it.

Anyway, I'm going to quote the part about me, wholesale, for my own reference.

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Canadian Bryan Lee O'Malley, 26, throws a bit of autobiography into his work, but he also adds elements of Hong Kong kung fu movies, Bollywood musicals and alt-rock icons in Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Oni Press), one of 2004's most popular graphic novels. It's the story of 23-year-old Scott Pilgrim, a slacker in a band who meets the love of his life in Ramona, a roller-blading delivery girl. The book has already been optioned for a movie, which has Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright slated to direct it. O'Malley's currently hard at work on the second Scott Pilgrim book, due in early summer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in which our slacker hero must face another one of Ramona's Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends.

O'Malley took a slightly more traditional career path than the others, drawing books written by other people, such as Jen Van Meter's Hopeless Savages. His first graphic novel Lost at Sea (Oni Press) got good reviews, but Scott Pilgrim was practically a cause célèbre, it generated so much interest. Although it's not exactly a manga, it takes a lot of the visual energy of manga and translates it into a decidedly contemporary, though utterly oddball, relationship story. Although he's read manga, O'Malley doesn't think of himself as a manga artist: "I think there was some kind of percolation in my mind, but it was partially unconscious." Reading about what other cartoonists were doing on a Web forum run by famed comics writer Warren Ellis helped him crystallize the idea that comics could be about anything and reflect the real world. "I'd pretty much given up on the idea of drawing the X-Men."

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I thought we were talking about Warren Ellis off the record!

Someone sent me a Career Fair type of survey for a school project, and I answered it. How terrible to think of my life in these terms!

( Pathetic! )

A new interview with me went up recently on AnimeFringe, conducted by my one-woman welcoming committee to Halifax, Shannon Fay. Contains enlightening capsule statements such as the following:

"...one day I decided to try drawing in that Sailor Moon style, and I practiced for a while and started making up my own anime fantasy characters, and I drew a few crappy comics and stuff."

Click here for the interview!

I'm just going to cross post this from my site, because it's not like you guys go to my site.

The latest, and probably last, Scott Pilgrim Volume 1-related interview is online. It's at Peiratikos and was conducted by Rose Curtin, with secret help from Steven Berg. I know this interview is kind of ridiculous and overblown, but I'm really grateful to them for going ahead with it. I hope at least a couple people read it and find it interesting, because I know I'm always eager to read huge, seemingly endless diatribes by my favourite creators and whatnot.

I was supposed to give a talk to high schoolers today at the Toronto Public Library, but all the high schools cancelled. I was left with a handful of librarians and some intelligent-seeming people who apparently came in off the street. It was a relatively painless introduction to the world of talking to people and not seeming like a total idiot. Also, I got to take a bunch of awesome books out from the library, including the first Moomintrolls book (see interview).