Raucous Underground

23 year old Scott Pilgrim is part of the band, Sex Bob-omb, and has started seeing a 17 year old, high school student, Knives Chau. Soon, Scott starts having dreams that keep getting invaded by a mysterious girl on rollerblades and he becomes obsessed with this mystery dream girl when he actually ends up seeing her in real life. Scott is able to find out she’s a delivery girl for Amazon.ca and decides to order something.

Come Monday morning, he has another dream and see’s the girl holding his package. He then wakes up and opens the front door just in time to see her ring the doorbell. After a bit of an awkward meeting, Scott finds out this girl, Ramona Flowers, uses subspace highways to make her deliveries faster and that one such highway goes right through Scott’s head. He convinces Ramona to hang out with him and the event ends with Scott sleeping with her (but not “sleeping with” her, ok?).

Scott soon receives an e-mail and a letter from a Matthew Patel, which he quickly dismisses. At the same time, Scott’s roommate, Wallace Wells, pressures him to break up with Knives, to which Scott promises, but that’s flakes out on the promise because Knives has totally fallen for Scott. That night, Scott’s band is playing at a concert but before they can get through the first song, Matthew Patel, the guy who was trying to contact Scott, comes flying through the wall and engages Scott in battle.

Patel explains he is one of Ramona’s ex boyfriends and that Scott must fight him. After a fairly one-sided fight, Patel is defeated and fades away, dropping a stack of coins in his place. Scott collects the spoils as bus fair and hurriedly leaves with Ramona. She explains that if Scott wants to date her that he might have to defeat her 7 evil exes. Scott agrees and asks specifically about one of her ex’s, Gideon, whom he’d heard of at a party, and upon hearing his name, Ramona’s expression changes and her head starts to glow.

This is an odd little graphic novel. The art is simple. The storytelling is simple. The idea seems fairly simple. It’s a basic idea that excels in its execution. The character interactions are usually funny but still hold a lot of heart. Scott seems awkward in his relationships but it’s endearing to his friends, and the reader, because he never seems to be a bad or selfish person and his friends are important to him. The graphic novel is full of little videogame references and the whole thing is really geeky (AWESOME) but what’s odd is how no one seems overly weirded out by subspace highways, people flying around throwing fire balls or demon hipster chicks. Still, this world of Scott Pilgrim’s is an interesting one and I am eager to read part two… Which I happen to have right here.