Review: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour

You know that saying: “The comic is better”? Well, in this case, I have no choice but to sadly inform you that this is true once again.

Looking back at the six books of the Scott Pilgrim series, I have to say… I really really liked it.

For those who watched the movie, it was made during the writing of the fourth book. Thus, the first three are very similar to the movie, the fourth has some similarities (that is about the point where Scott meets Ramona’s evil ex-girlfriend) and the last two (the twins and Gideon) diverge quite wildly.

I wouldn’t say the movie is bad, I also like it very much, but the comics is deeper, explores more of the characters’ relationships and explains many things that the movie left open, such as those subspace tunnels Ramona takes. It also rewrites Ramona’s disappearance (which makes more sense, I think) and makes Gideon’s obsession a bit more reasonable, if still a bit whacky.

But what really resonates is the fact that Brian O’Malley is telling a story here. No, it’s not like he wrote a story from above and now you are reading it. It’s like he’s telling you a cool story he witnessed. Complete with references, characters breaking the fourth wall, meta-explanations and Scott being an almost complete douche. Making his evolution much more compelling.

Since this is my first foray back into reading comics since I stopped several years ago I have to remark on comics in general. Now I have a comic book reader on my phone and I found out that reading comics is really easy. Yes, every good book has between 200-300 pages or up to 500-600 pages when it comes to the big manga books. But every page has the equivalent of about a paragraph of text. So reading a chapter is usually a matter of 2-3 minutes. Thus, I’ve found my joy in reading comics again. It is great fun. And this was an especially good book to get back to it.


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