Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6 by Bryan Lee O'Malley

It's nice to have more openly gay characters in YA media, but not as thin, walking punchlines. None of it is going to strike you as interesting or witty if you’re the least bit familiar with internet subcultures and humor already.īoth also had somewhat unsettling homophobic overtones, playing off all the gay characters and same-sex romance for jokes-and cute lesbians for titillation. Both Nick and Nora's and Scott Pilgrim were by-the-book quirky. It's like your friend who thinks saying 'remember that episode of Family Guy?' is the same as telling a good joke. Then again, by this point, quirky internet humor has entered the mainstream and lost much of its punch, like Jerry Seinfeld talking about airline food: now everyone’s doing it. I never felt there was a quick, complex mind at the helm-and with modern, referential humor, it's all about the delivery and the originality. Both of them are trying to be cutesy, quirky, ironic, and referential, but it's all very familiar stuff. It's reminiscent of Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, a movie I tired of about halfway through. Also like a web comic archive, it gradually gets better-but not quickly enough.

I've heard some people blame manga/anime inspiration for the similarity of O'Malley's characters, but there are plenty of manga artists who have mastered the art of caricature, and use it to great effect.

The jokes lack subtlety and insight, the characters are consistently annoying, the art's rudimentary, everyone looks the same (except for their hair, which the author constantly changes, anyways). You know that thing, where you find this great webcomic and spend half an hour clicking through it backwards, seeing whether it only had a few good strips, or whether its actually solid throughout, and then you figure 'what the hell, I'm not doing anything tonight' and so you click the 'archive' button, and go back to the first comic, and it's from 2002, and it's just bad-flat art, dumb jokes, no sense of pacing? That's the experience of reading Scott Pilgrim.

Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6 by Bryan Lee O'Malley