Oh hey Scott Pilgrim!- A warm up

I'm just about to get into some articles I'm writing for fanexpo stuff, but I thought a warm up would be useful, and maybe if it's just me going on about whatever, I may as well get my Scott Pilgrim thing out of the way.

So in Feb 2006 (I think) I started working at the Grey Region Comic store at Yonge and Wellesley, and the first two Scott Pilgrims were out.

The above sentence was basically all I had waiting for me in the limbo of waiting to be completed/posted blog entries. Part of what has been slowing me down on writing about Scott Pilgrim is that I think that somewhere there's a progression, a story about how I got into it, my feelings about it, but until I figure it out it's just a bunch of mostly random impressions. Which is usually what you get out of me anyways.

So the first two Scott Pilgrims were out, and I don't think I read them, maybe the first one, but it would have taken a while, because when I first started working at that store I was pretty serious about not taking advantage and just reading comics all the time (by the end I'd read something like 4 volumes of the Image comic 'Noble Causes')- but the book, in being there, in being something I didn't immediately know what it was about.. Well, obviously, I had made it. I worked in a store with cool things (if I don't know what it is, it is cool. That's how it works, right?) making ME cool. I keep wanting to call it an 'orange' atmosphere, the region of the store its presence contributed to (there were other mystery titles as well, I just can't think of them right now, but they were banded together, oh yes indeed, to reinforce their coolness) but that doesn't make any sense. What does 'orange', in this context, mean?

I don't know.

BUT then we can flash forward to the future (of course) when I've long since not been working at the Grey Region store (that's a long story. Ha, no it isn't, I'm kidding, the boss was just "so, yeah, I'm cutting back on your hours, I'll call you if anything comes up" and I'm thinking "wow, you don't even have the guts to just fire someone") things are blue, not like the jazz, library blue, like the Toronto library cards themselves, but a little lighter and friendlier, and I read the Pilgrim's progress (by which I mean Scott Pilgrim vol 1 through maybe 4, not the book 'Pilgrim's Progress' which I only read this past winter and at the moment I forget who wrote it) and read them twice through the same day I borrowed them.

Flash forward again, a friend of mine who I no longer talk to, and has managed to super alienate himself from everybody I know he knew, was selling all his comics. Which, to me, would be the first sign of being crazy-go-nuts, but that's just me. I bought his Scott Pilgrim set, one through four or five and paid a super low price for them. In fact, I insisted I pay a bit more, so I did. I guess he was desperate for money to pay back his recently ex girlfriend so he could cut those ties (or try to).

Relatively soon after that (several months) I loaned all the books (definitely 1 to 5 this time) to said ex girlfriend, because she's a friend of mine. She kept them nearly forever, and felt really bad about it, but I didn't mind, especially since she enjoyed them so much.

Loaned them out to a bunch of friends, probably around this time I hear about the Scott Pilgrim movie and the casting of Michael Cera, at first I was all for it and everyone else was not (or so I'll say for simplicities sake) but then the trailer hit and I wasn't blown away and everyone else went: wWWAAAAAAAHHT?!?!? (as in: "it's so awesome!")

They were amazed, it was apparently perfect. I thought he looked too awkward and Cera-y in bed with the Ramona Flowers girl- and if the central relationship of the movie doesn't seem natural, that's a problem, right? Well, it was just a trailer.

The sixth book comes out, I miss the midnight release because of work and a lack of team planning, but I didn't really mind that much. I got to go to bed when others were not in bed... he says at a computer at 2:20 in the morning when he should have finished his articles and gone to bed to rest up for the fanexpo stuff tomorrow.

Got the sixth book. Continued to loan out the books to friends, thus continuing to increase love of Scott Pilgrim. It's revealed that two of my bros aren't the biggest fans of Pilgrim, but it's because he's a flawed character, and there are worse things than having a relatively realistic protagonist who makes mistakes and everything. It was of course a new way to go about it, but hey, lets give it a shot, why not?

^Sarcasm

The movie I got to see with a bunch of friends, which was the plan all along... not actually (for the most part) any of the friends who I'd gotten hooked on the thing, but whatever, it was a lot of fun and a blast.

The dialogue did a good job of incorporating the spirit of the books into movie format (not easy when trying to work with the "talking is a free action" style that you get in many comics) but some of that dialogue could have been better... if they did it the way I imagined it as being said.

*Isaac Laughs at Himself*

Yes, I know that'd only make the movie better suited to MY tastes... I'm allowed to think things would be better for me if they were made for me. That actually is just true. Straight up, yup.

The fight scenes must have been made for me though, because they were amazing.

Okay, that's plenty good, now for an e-mail to be written and THEN my articles.

Hmm, I may have crossed the line from "warm up" to "procrastination".