I can't believe this is the last volume! I'm going to miss it so much. It was great. ( )

After some mixed reactions (mostly during book one) I can officially say that by the end of the sixth volume I enjoyed the Scott Pilgrim series. I found them to be charming and sweet and romantic. Surprisingly, I found them to very rarely be cheesy, an impresseive feat given the genre of literature: Teen Romance Manga??

At the same time, reading the books I understood that I am a little too old for them. Don't get me wrong, I devoured these books with gusto. But I can't help but feel that if I had come across them when I was 17 years old, they would have affected me on a much deeper level. I would have been fanatic about them, rather than amused and charmed by them.

At first glance, the Scott Pilgrim series seems vaguely fucked up. The premise, after all, is that the main character must fight and defeat the seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win the love of his girlfriend Ramona. On the surface, this is some misogynist bullshit, only men in comic books (or, perhaps, rams) need to defeat other men in battle in order to woo their women, and this is a tired cliche. But perhaps a deeper reading is in order here.

It's true that the title of the book is Scott Pilgrim, and that the storyline most often follows Scott. However, Scott barely exists. From the moment she appears, Ramona is a three dimensional character with a past, a background, depth, hobbies, interests, a job, a place to live, friends, etc. Scott, on the other hand, is almost a cardboard cutout. We learn he is in a band. He doesn't really have a place to live (he's crashing at a friend's house (since...?), he has no apparent job (it's revealed later he doesn't have one), he has no direction, no past, and no real future. We don't know very much about him because he doesn't know very much about himself! Scott has only one dimension, and it takes Ramona to bring him any semblance of depth.

So perhaps the story is really about Ramona. She has demons that she needs to work out with regard to her past boyfriends. And she uses Scott to get to a place where she can love herself and, eventually, when he develops into a human being for her and for us, she can love him as well. Read like this, the book is not nearly so misogynist. It's almost refreshing!

Anyhow, perhaps I'm just trying to justify why I would totally recommend this book to anyone with a couple of hours to burn (it goes really quickly). I can't necessarily tell you why you should read it (I never quite figured out why I was reading it myself), but I can tell you that it's fun. ( )

heartfelt, engaging, hilarious, human ( )

I smiled and laughed my way through all six volumes this quirky series. Scott is slightly awkward, doing things like learning the guitar line from Final Fantasy, and saying stuff like, “I wish I could turn into a morphing ball and roll to the bathroom from here, instead of having to get up.” The characters are likeable alternative types. The illustrations are well-done—expressive and humorous. It’s part manga, part comic book, and part video game, but the story and writing are strong enough for me to love it even though I’m not a gamer or comic book nerd. ( )