Wizard quizzes me on influences and homages in Scott Pilgrim. This is a cute article that I completely forgot ever answering questions for. Big ups to Kiel Phegley at Wizard.

There are no spoilers in it - it's about the series to date, but not at all about Volume 4. I think I answered the questions either at MoCCA or sometime over the summer.

Check it out if you dare! Looking at these pages will uncover a relatively minor spoiler, but it's something that I successfully kept under wraps until today. I will talk about the book more LATER.

An interview around the release of Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, conducted by Jason Heller. Here it is!

While I'm at it, the AV Club also reviewed said book the other day. It's right under Nicholas Gurewitch's brilliant first collection of the Perry Bible Fellowship.

(I originally posted this on Saturday, but the interview disappeared - apparently it had accidentally been posted a few days early. It's now officially up.)

Can you guys help me out with something?

I would like to compile a list of reviews of Scott Pilgrim 1, 2, and 3, from whichever sources - preferably the ones that are more-or-less "official" and not like a kid posting his thoughts on his livejournal or something.

Format like this:

URL
Article title (if applicable)
Author's name
Source (publication or website)
Pull quote (pick the most representative line or two from the review - you know, like they do at metacritic and such)

This is for the forthcoming new Scott Pilgrim website.

If you folks reading the livejournal have some free time, please start compiling these links in the comments. Thanks ever so much. I'll contribute when I have some time and a solid internet connection.

just real quick, someone pointed out an extremely long (and illustrated!) article on Slate about Scott Pilgrim.

(article spoilers!) i think the author is correct in that Vol 3 is troubled, but i'm not sure he's correct as to why. we'll see how it goes with Vol 4!

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EDIT: Here is an article about the article!

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EDIT: My main thing here is that a reputable publication has done an in-depth article about my work, whether that article is full of insight (I think it has some) or bonkers (not for me to say). I'm flattered, etc.

After reading that, i went to a friend's house and on the TV were the Scream Awards, and there was tons of stuff about comics on them! What is this cultural mountain comics have climbed?

The Scream Awards had a disturbing effect on me. I got this feeling like we're all 14 years old and there are beautiful girls pretending to like us in order to get something they want from us. There's this weird air of fakeness and placation and softcore porn and the feeling that any minute now they'll all laugh in our faces, jump in the back of some jock's convertible, and drive away with our souls!!!

Admittedly I wasn't really paying attention and I just kept incredulously repeating phrases I heard: "COMICON?? FRANK MILLER??! BEST SUPERHERO???? ROBERT KIRKMAN!??!" Everyone definitely wanted me to shut up. Anyway, I know I saw Kirkman go up, but I think it was for Marvel Zombies, rather than his creator-owned work. Marvel Zombies wins over the Walking Dead?? Who do I payola for that kind of result? Plus they were showing unreleased footage from new movies?? It was like comicon all over again! It's creepy! (The Grind House footage looked sweet, though.)

Anyway, I'm disturbed by the whole thing, the new faux-legitimacy of comics, and I'm obviously this huge cynical jerk waiting for the bubble to burst. Or maybe I just have low self-esteem and a profound fear of success. I just hope they make my movie soon! ^_____^

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!