JohnLees
Wednesday, September 01, 2010, 04:53 PM
Greetings Clubbers! In today’s meeting, we’ll be discussing two of the year’s best movies: Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World. As some pundits and naysayers talk about the superhero bubble being about to burst and this golden age of comic book movies being set to come to an abrupt end, these films showed that there was still plenty of fresh approaches to the comic book movie, even to the superhero movie. So today we’ll be looking at the process of adaptation from comic to film for each movie, and the implication of adapting a comic story that is not yet completed, as was the case for both Kick-Ass and the Scott Pilgrim series.
We’ll start with Kick-Ass, both the Matthew Vaughn movie and the comic written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita, Jr. And really, the two come together, and always have, which generated quite a bit of controversy amongst comic fans. The film rights to Kick-Ass were sold before the first issue was even published, the film script and the comic were written simultaneously, and due to massive delays on the comic, the film had already wrapped shooting and was almost ready for the release by the time the final issue of the comic series finally hit stands. I for one had problems with the comic, both on principle due to this strange dynamic, and in the actual execution of the comic itself.
Here’s the strange thing. Back when I bought the first issue of Kick-Ass the comic, I didn’t really like it. Yet I loved Kick-Ass the movie. Why is that? Yes, there are some differences in the comic and the film, that I’ll get to later, but basically it’s the same story. Why does it, in my opinion at least, work much better in one medium than it does in the other? The answer that occurs to me probably lies at the core of my problems with the comic: Kick-Ass was never really created to be a comic. From its very inception, it existed as a blueprint for a film adaptation, and so was never allowed to simply exist as a comic book in of itself. When something is created with an adaptation into another medium already set up, already in the creator’s mind at the point where he is writing the story, then its existence in its original medium is rendered incomplete, a stepping stone in the story’s progress onto its final destination in that other medium. Kick-Ass reads like a comic that wants to be a movie. So of course the movie is going to be better – film is where the story was, from the very beginning, intended to be told. And this intention carries through into the comic itself. At times the comic reads like storyboards for a movie, using cinematic layouts and employing the storytelling language of cinema in its plot construction.
But this is not a case where my problems with Kick-Ass stem from it simply existing itself. I found the content of the comic itself to be pretty objectionable. Millar is someone who has written good stories, and as a fellow Scotsman making it big in the comic industry of course I have to respect him, but Kick-Ass the comic just wasn’t for me. The marketing of the book was all about the shock and spectacle – from the front cover declaration on the first issue that it was “the greatest superhero book of all time” to the very title of the series. And that wham-bam in your face shock value is plastered throughout the book – by the fourth page we have a teenager getting jump leads attached to his testicles and electrocuted. But when a book is constantly trying to shock you – often for no apparent reason other than to shock – it soon loses its effect, and just becomes distancing.
I felt similarly about the swearing, too. Now, I’m no prude when it comes to bad language. And I think the movie brilliantly handled lines like “I’m just ****ing with you, daddy” or “okay you ****s, let’s see what you can do” as they came from the mouth of Hit-Girl. When one character is so foul-mouthed – particularly someone you’d never expect, like a little girl – it can be a great comedic device. But when it feels like every character is constantly swearing, all the time, once again it has a numbing effect. I counted 23 ****s in the first chapter alone – which works out at roughly a **** a page. And it isn’t something like The Thick of It or Deadwood where the bad language really contributes to the aesthetic of the story – instead more often than not it just feels out of place and cartoonish.
But most alienating of all for me was the extreme cynicism of the story, how unlikeable just about everyone is, and how just about every potential dramatic moment is deflated and turned into a joke. In the Kick-Ass movie, I liked the awkward friendship/one-sided romance between Dave and Katie, and how perfectly pitched that subtle first miscommunication was where Katie waves at her friend and Dave waves back thinking she’s waving at him, leading to cringing embarrassment for poor Dave that is a totally relatable high school experience. Now compare that to the pair’s first encounter on page 6 of the comic, where Katie says this in response to Dave’s conversation-starter of “Oh hey Katie. I didn’t know you were a member,” of the club he’s standing outside:
Yes you did, you ****ing stalker. You watched my dad drop us off. The guy on the door said you’ve been hanging around for three goddamn hours… Get the **** away from me, you loser. And quit staring at me in class. You’re giving me the creeps.
To me, this moment misfires on several levels. First, you lose all the subtlety and familiarity of the miscommunication in the movie for an aforementioned barrage of obscenity. Next, this paints Katie as a really horrible, bratty character who we instantly dislike, and have no emotional investment in actually seeing Dave get it together with. Then, perhaps worst of all, it also makes us dislike Dave himself, our main character. In the narration afterwards, he says he’s “just an ordinary guy”. But by hanging around outside a club for hours waiting for this girl, he is indeed acting creepy, and so we become alienated from him too and he feels like less of a Peter Parker style Everyman (or is that Everyboy?). Continuing with this thread of Dave and Katie, in the film and the comic respectively, in the film Dave’s emotional confession to Katie that he is not gay and is in fact in love with her leads to Katie realizing she loves him too and the two becoming a couple. In the comic, it leads to Katie berating and rejecting him, getting her boyfriend to beat him up, then sending pictures to Dave’s phone of her performing oral sex on her boyfriend to taunt him. Like I said, it’s all very cynical: the story makes it very difficult to build any kind of emotional investment in its characters, then does stuff like this to mock those who do, as if to say, “How silly of you to care.”
The worst example of this, for me, and probably the most glaring example of the film getting something right that the comic got wrong, is in the depiction of Big Daddy. Now, whatever way you spin it, whatever medium the story is told, the idea of a father training his daughter to become a murderous vigilante is a difficult one to swallow, with the inevitable response from us readers/viewers that this is irresponsible parenting at best, and emotional (and even physical) abuse at worst. But at least in the film, we get a portrait of a man who has been genuinely wronged by Frank D’Amico, someone whose life has been ruined, someone who blames the death of his wife on D’Amico and his crew and who thus has a genuine motive for revenge against him. From this perspective, aided by stellar performances from Nicholas Cage and young Chloe Moretz, the fantasy personas of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl feel like Macready’s attempt to protect the daughter from the grim reality of his obsession with vengeance by turning it into a game – almost like a superhero-themed Life is Beautiful. And with Big Daddy dying in his daughter’s arms, and Mindy returning to base to find the two cups of hot chocolate with marshmallows they were going to drink together when they got home, Matthew Vaughn manages to glean a note of genuine tragedy from Big Daddy’s violent death.
Not so with the comic. The Big Daddy of the comic is simply a comic geek who fantasized about becoming a superhero in the style of The Punisher, and so lied to his daughter about them becoming crime-fighters to avenge her mother’s death in order for them to be able to live a more “exciting” life. From this perspective, the irresponsible parenting and emotional abuse are juvenile and pointless, a little girl’s life screwed up solely because of her father’s selfish desire for adventure. Rather than gaining empathy for the pair, we are emotionally distanced from both. It’s all treated like a big joke, and far from being tragic, in the comics Big Daddy’s abrupt, undignified death is like a punchline.
And this all ties back to the simultaneous development of the comic and the film. Kick-Ass the comic is plotted and structured like a blueprint for Kick-Ass the film, but it’s an imperfect blueprint. And so it feels less like a comic than a rough first draft of the Kick-Ass screenplay – only with gorgeous art from John Romita, Jr. – with Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman refining the script for use in the film. As a result, for me Kick-Ass is something of an odd entity for me, where despite it starting out as a comic, it feels like it’s the movie that’s the “real” Kick-Ass, that cinema is the medium where this story works best. This reminds me of a quote by Mark Millar from a March 29th interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, on the changing nature of comic-to-film adaptation:
The trouble is that the superhero movies so far – and I don't want to be unfair to them because I think generally they have been good – have been made two generations after they've been created, and in Superman's case three generations after they've been created. So if the technology had existed to make a Fantastic Four movie in 1966 it would have been amazing, because you had Kennedy and the space race and all of that. But now, really, what is the Fantastic Four?
With Kick-Ass, the book's just out and now the movie's out six weeks later. And I think that's the way things are going to go now, because to go to Marvel's B and C-list characters and try to get movies out them - what's the point of that?
I think there’s an unsettling undertone to this line of thought that a comic’s value lies in its adaptability, in how effective it can become as a film. Is this “the way things are going to go now”? With comics becoming such a fertile breeding ground for film projects that comics as a medium become subjugated to cinema, with the original comic becoming like film-lite, a mere starter dish before the cinematic main course?
However, there is also a valid point in what Millar is saying here, and it touches on the crux of what we’re discussing today. As I started this column by saying, Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World are, in my opinion, two of the year’s best films. Both are based on comics published in this decade. Red, due out later this year, is also based on a comic from this decade, as was the recently released (and previously discussed) The Losers. The upcoming, highly-anticipated TV adaptation of The Walking Dead is also based on a comic series that began this decade. As we get more and more of the classic, iconic superheroes making the leap from page to screen, with less and less still waiting to be adapted, does the future of the comic book movie lie not in the glut of hasty franchise reboots lined up – Marc Webb’s Spider-Man reboot, X-Men: First Class, the recently-rumored CGI Fantastic Four – but in moving past the classic superheroes and starting to adapt these more modern comic book properties? And what could the implications of this shift be?
To answer this, let’s take a look now at Scott Pilgrim VS the World, and the six-volume comic series by Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley that the film is based on. First, I apologize for the limited reading list that doesn’t cover much of the Scott Pilgrim saga. My reasons for only including the first volume, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, on the reading list were twofold. First, because I was aware of the hefty reading list lined up for the next meeting, and didn’t want to overwhelm you guys. Second, and more selfishly, I didn’t want to spoil the plot of the movie too much, so set things up so I only had to read the first volume. Sorry! However, I did love that first volume, and if you guys are interested, I’d be happy to set up a meeting discussing the other five volumes of the Scott Pilgrim series in greater depth. Let me know!
Another trait shared by the film adaptations of Kick-Ass and the Scott Pilgrim series is that the film was wrapped and about to be released in cinemas when the last installment of the comic story was released. But a key difference is that Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life was first released way back in 2004, and had well established its quirky, offbeat identity as a comic book long before the gears started turning on the film adaptation. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life does employ some of the language of films in its storytelling, yes, but it also takes cues from cartoons and video games, all mixing up into a unique end product that is very much tailored for the comic book medium. As a result, whereas Kick-Ass is a case of a comic being heavy influenced by movies, Bryan Lee O’Malley crafted an identity for his Scott Pilgrim series that was so distinctive that Scott Pilgrim VS the World is a case of a movie being heavy influenced by comics.
Not only does the film perfectly replicate many panel layouts, but we even have narrative captions and sound effects popping up on-screen as they do on the comic panel. Not that this is a verbatim translation of the comics. The jump from print to screen allows for more pastiche to get rolled into the mix – take the great riff on Seinfeld, for example, or Scott Pilgrim’s daily routines and personal anxieties being narrated by Gravelly Voiceover Man. The film’s success in capturing pop-culture minutiae from across multiple mediums is probably largely due to Edgar Wright – a perfect match of a director for a project if ever there was one, given that Wright tread similar territory in his excellent UK TV series, Spaced. Scott Pilgrim VS the World is a film that simultaneously captures the spirit of the source material while exploring the new possibilities that a different medium opens up.
But while in terms of quality I’d say the films Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World are about equal, what set Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life apart from Kick-Ass the comic for me was that there was a spirit there for the film to capture. The relationship between film and comic is not as symbiotic as it is with Kick-Ass. Bryan Lee O’Malley created a unique world with its own rules, meant specifically for the comic page. He wrote it, and he drew it, he created this comic book world, with no thought to a movie.
So what of this world that O’Malley has created? This is a world where Amazon delivery girls take shortcuts through people’s dreams, where bad guys can use mystical powers to summon bat-winged demon girls to their aid and burst into coins when they die, and where bands can play songs with specific note combinations that will render their entire audience unconscious “for 20-30 minutes”. All with no real explanation, and seemingly just taken for granted by the characters. Note how unsurprised everyone seems to be when Matthew Patel bursts through the roof of the Rockit club and starts trying to kill Scott:
And that’s perhaps what makes all this craziness feel so crazy, when it might not seem so unusual if it were to happen in a superhero book: a lot of it just comes out of left-field in a story that otherwise seems so grounded in the humdrum regular world. Like how explosions and car chases may be par for the course in a James Bond film, but we may have been surprised (and may have enjoyed the films more) if they turned up in the Sex and the City series. One possible explanation crops up on page 10 of Chapter 4: Ramona Come Closer:
SCOTT: Well… my last job is a really long story, filled with sighs. Maybe we can get into it in a later volume.
RAMONA: I don’t even want to talk about my last job.
SCOTT: Maybe volume three for that one.
It’s almost as if Scott Pilgrim and all the people around him are aware that they are in a comic book, and as such freely incorporate comic book elements such as supervillains and epic battles into their everyday love story when they feel the tools available to them in a regular comedy or drama are not sufficient to express the emotions they are experiencing.
Now, I don’t want to go into too much detail on the comics themselves, in case you guys do want to hold a meeting looking at the rest of the series in more depth, so I’ll steer things back towards how this relates to the movie. With Kick-Ass, you had a comic that felt rough, flawed and incomplete, like a template for the movie, and as such I said the movie felt more like the “real” Kick-Ass, with the comic simply serving to point us towards that movie. With Scott Pilgrim VS the World, I think the opposite is the case. The movie is great, but the comics are so detailed and intricate and idiosyncratic, with even minor characters having their own little tangential storylines going on, that a movie can only hope to provide a sampler of the world Bryan Lee O’Malley created. Scott Pilgrim VS the World is great, but the “real” Scott Pilgrim remains in the comics. The movie is crafted in a way that rather than feeling like it’s the refined, superior end product to the comic work in progress, instead we are pointed back to the comics where we can immerse ourselves deeper in the richness of the world and learn more about these characters we glimpsed on the big screen. It’s a more circular relationship between film and comics, with the comics exciting us for the possibility of the film, but the film also pointing us back towards the comics.
To go back to Mark Millar’s predictions on the future of comic book movies, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life is a very modern comic book. While classic, iconic superheroes may have been influenced by the pulp heroes of the 20s and 30s, Scott Pilgrim is a hero influenced not only by those earlier comic book superheroes, but by video game heroes (both platform games and beat-em-ups), and by 90s slacker culture. Both Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World represent comic book movies based on new ideas, celebrations of original ideas and approaches rather than adhering to the Superhero Origin Story mould. If the relatively poor box office doesn’t dissuade film studios and they start seeking out more alternative voices from the comic book world, perhaps then filmmakers and audiences will appreciate more that comic books are a medium, not a genre, and that they can be a fertile ground for film adaptation beyond just rebooting and redoing the superhero franchises that have already been hit movies.
Meeting #34
This meeting was light on the reading front because we have a mighty pile of reading waiting for you next meeting. And all of it from the same creator – Jeff Lemire, a Canadian writer/artist who has made a name for himself on the indie scene over this decade. We’re going to take a look at his work, and identify what themes and techniques are most prominent throughout. And as Lemire find his status in the industry growing - with his own Vertigo title and now work writing within the DC Universe – what defining aspects of his early work have carried over into the mainstream?
RECOMMENDED READING
The Complete Essex County
Jeff Lemire
The Nobody
Jeff Lemire
Sweet Tooth: Out of the Deep Woods
Jeff Lemire
Meeting #35
The Killing Joke
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel
Loki
We’ll start with Kick-Ass, both the Matthew Vaughn movie and the comic written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita, Jr. And really, the two come together, and always have, which generated quite a bit of controversy amongst comic fans. The film rights to Kick-Ass were sold before the first issue was even published, the film script and the comic were written simultaneously, and due to massive delays on the comic, the film had already wrapped shooting and was almost ready for the release by the time the final issue of the comic series finally hit stands. I for one had problems with the comic, both on principle due to this strange dynamic, and in the actual execution of the comic itself.
Here’s the strange thing. Back when I bought the first issue of Kick-Ass the comic, I didn’t really like it. Yet I loved Kick-Ass the movie. Why is that? Yes, there are some differences in the comic and the film, that I’ll get to later, but basically it’s the same story. Why does it, in my opinion at least, work much better in one medium than it does in the other? The answer that occurs to me probably lies at the core of my problems with the comic: Kick-Ass was never really created to be a comic. From its very inception, it existed as a blueprint for a film adaptation, and so was never allowed to simply exist as a comic book in of itself. When something is created with an adaptation into another medium already set up, already in the creator’s mind at the point where he is writing the story, then its existence in its original medium is rendered incomplete, a stepping stone in the story’s progress onto its final destination in that other medium. Kick-Ass reads like a comic that wants to be a movie. So of course the movie is going to be better – film is where the story was, from the very beginning, intended to be told. And this intention carries through into the comic itself. At times the comic reads like storyboards for a movie, using cinematic layouts and employing the storytelling language of cinema in its plot construction.
But this is not a case where my problems with Kick-Ass stem from it simply existing itself. I found the content of the comic itself to be pretty objectionable. Millar is someone who has written good stories, and as a fellow Scotsman making it big in the comic industry of course I have to respect him, but Kick-Ass the comic just wasn’t for me. The marketing of the book was all about the shock and spectacle – from the front cover declaration on the first issue that it was “the greatest superhero book of all time” to the very title of the series. And that wham-bam in your face shock value is plastered throughout the book – by the fourth page we have a teenager getting jump leads attached to his testicles and electrocuted. But when a book is constantly trying to shock you – often for no apparent reason other than to shock – it soon loses its effect, and just becomes distancing.
I felt similarly about the swearing, too. Now, I’m no prude when it comes to bad language. And I think the movie brilliantly handled lines like “I’m just ****ing with you, daddy” or “okay you ****s, let’s see what you can do” as they came from the mouth of Hit-Girl. When one character is so foul-mouthed – particularly someone you’d never expect, like a little girl – it can be a great comedic device. But when it feels like every character is constantly swearing, all the time, once again it has a numbing effect. I counted 23 ****s in the first chapter alone – which works out at roughly a **** a page. And it isn’t something like The Thick of It or Deadwood where the bad language really contributes to the aesthetic of the story – instead more often than not it just feels out of place and cartoonish.
But most alienating of all for me was the extreme cynicism of the story, how unlikeable just about everyone is, and how just about every potential dramatic moment is deflated and turned into a joke. In the Kick-Ass movie, I liked the awkward friendship/one-sided romance between Dave and Katie, and how perfectly pitched that subtle first miscommunication was where Katie waves at her friend and Dave waves back thinking she’s waving at him, leading to cringing embarrassment for poor Dave that is a totally relatable high school experience. Now compare that to the pair’s first encounter on page 6 of the comic, where Katie says this in response to Dave’s conversation-starter of “Oh hey Katie. I didn’t know you were a member,” of the club he’s standing outside:
Yes you did, you ****ing stalker. You watched my dad drop us off. The guy on the door said you’ve been hanging around for three goddamn hours… Get the **** away from me, you loser. And quit staring at me in class. You’re giving me the creeps.
To me, this moment misfires on several levels. First, you lose all the subtlety and familiarity of the miscommunication in the movie for an aforementioned barrage of obscenity. Next, this paints Katie as a really horrible, bratty character who we instantly dislike, and have no emotional investment in actually seeing Dave get it together with. Then, perhaps worst of all, it also makes us dislike Dave himself, our main character. In the narration afterwards, he says he’s “just an ordinary guy”. But by hanging around outside a club for hours waiting for this girl, he is indeed acting creepy, and so we become alienated from him too and he feels like less of a Peter Parker style Everyman (or is that Everyboy?). Continuing with this thread of Dave and Katie, in the film and the comic respectively, in the film Dave’s emotional confession to Katie that he is not gay and is in fact in love with her leads to Katie realizing she loves him too and the two becoming a couple. In the comic, it leads to Katie berating and rejecting him, getting her boyfriend to beat him up, then sending pictures to Dave’s phone of her performing oral sex on her boyfriend to taunt him. Like I said, it’s all very cynical: the story makes it very difficult to build any kind of emotional investment in its characters, then does stuff like this to mock those who do, as if to say, “How silly of you to care.”
The worst example of this, for me, and probably the most glaring example of the film getting something right that the comic got wrong, is in the depiction of Big Daddy. Now, whatever way you spin it, whatever medium the story is told, the idea of a father training his daughter to become a murderous vigilante is a difficult one to swallow, with the inevitable response from us readers/viewers that this is irresponsible parenting at best, and emotional (and even physical) abuse at worst. But at least in the film, we get a portrait of a man who has been genuinely wronged by Frank D’Amico, someone whose life has been ruined, someone who blames the death of his wife on D’Amico and his crew and who thus has a genuine motive for revenge against him. From this perspective, aided by stellar performances from Nicholas Cage and young Chloe Moretz, the fantasy personas of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl feel like Macready’s attempt to protect the daughter from the grim reality of his obsession with vengeance by turning it into a game – almost like a superhero-themed Life is Beautiful. And with Big Daddy dying in his daughter’s arms, and Mindy returning to base to find the two cups of hot chocolate with marshmallows they were going to drink together when they got home, Matthew Vaughn manages to glean a note of genuine tragedy from Big Daddy’s violent death.
Not so with the comic. The Big Daddy of the comic is simply a comic geek who fantasized about becoming a superhero in the style of The Punisher, and so lied to his daughter about them becoming crime-fighters to avenge her mother’s death in order for them to be able to live a more “exciting” life. From this perspective, the irresponsible parenting and emotional abuse are juvenile and pointless, a little girl’s life screwed up solely because of her father’s selfish desire for adventure. Rather than gaining empathy for the pair, we are emotionally distanced from both. It’s all treated like a big joke, and far from being tragic, in the comics Big Daddy’s abrupt, undignified death is like a punchline.
And this all ties back to the simultaneous development of the comic and the film. Kick-Ass the comic is plotted and structured like a blueprint for Kick-Ass the film, but it’s an imperfect blueprint. And so it feels less like a comic than a rough first draft of the Kick-Ass screenplay – only with gorgeous art from John Romita, Jr. – with Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman refining the script for use in the film. As a result, for me Kick-Ass is something of an odd entity for me, where despite it starting out as a comic, it feels like it’s the movie that’s the “real” Kick-Ass, that cinema is the medium where this story works best. This reminds me of a quote by Mark Millar from a March 29th interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, on the changing nature of comic-to-film adaptation:
The trouble is that the superhero movies so far – and I don't want to be unfair to them because I think generally they have been good – have been made two generations after they've been created, and in Superman's case three generations after they've been created. So if the technology had existed to make a Fantastic Four movie in 1966 it would have been amazing, because you had Kennedy and the space race and all of that. But now, really, what is the Fantastic Four?
With Kick-Ass, the book's just out and now the movie's out six weeks later. And I think that's the way things are going to go now, because to go to Marvel's B and C-list characters and try to get movies out them - what's the point of that?
I think there’s an unsettling undertone to this line of thought that a comic’s value lies in its adaptability, in how effective it can become as a film. Is this “the way things are going to go now”? With comics becoming such a fertile breeding ground for film projects that comics as a medium become subjugated to cinema, with the original comic becoming like film-lite, a mere starter dish before the cinematic main course?
However, there is also a valid point in what Millar is saying here, and it touches on the crux of what we’re discussing today. As I started this column by saying, Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World are, in my opinion, two of the year’s best films. Both are based on comics published in this decade. Red, due out later this year, is also based on a comic from this decade, as was the recently released (and previously discussed) The Losers. The upcoming, highly-anticipated TV adaptation of The Walking Dead is also based on a comic series that began this decade. As we get more and more of the classic, iconic superheroes making the leap from page to screen, with less and less still waiting to be adapted, does the future of the comic book movie lie not in the glut of hasty franchise reboots lined up – Marc Webb’s Spider-Man reboot, X-Men: First Class, the recently-rumored CGI Fantastic Four – but in moving past the classic superheroes and starting to adapt these more modern comic book properties? And what could the implications of this shift be?
To answer this, let’s take a look now at Scott Pilgrim VS the World, and the six-volume comic series by Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley that the film is based on. First, I apologize for the limited reading list that doesn’t cover much of the Scott Pilgrim saga. My reasons for only including the first volume, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, on the reading list were twofold. First, because I was aware of the hefty reading list lined up for the next meeting, and didn’t want to overwhelm you guys. Second, and more selfishly, I didn’t want to spoil the plot of the movie too much, so set things up so I only had to read the first volume. Sorry! However, I did love that first volume, and if you guys are interested, I’d be happy to set up a meeting discussing the other five volumes of the Scott Pilgrim series in greater depth. Let me know!
Another trait shared by the film adaptations of Kick-Ass and the Scott Pilgrim series is that the film was wrapped and about to be released in cinemas when the last installment of the comic story was released. But a key difference is that Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life was first released way back in 2004, and had well established its quirky, offbeat identity as a comic book long before the gears started turning on the film adaptation. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life does employ some of the language of films in its storytelling, yes, but it also takes cues from cartoons and video games, all mixing up into a unique end product that is very much tailored for the comic book medium. As a result, whereas Kick-Ass is a case of a comic being heavy influenced by movies, Bryan Lee O’Malley crafted an identity for his Scott Pilgrim series that was so distinctive that Scott Pilgrim VS the World is a case of a movie being heavy influenced by comics.
Not only does the film perfectly replicate many panel layouts, but we even have narrative captions and sound effects popping up on-screen as they do on the comic panel. Not that this is a verbatim translation of the comics. The jump from print to screen allows for more pastiche to get rolled into the mix – take the great riff on Seinfeld, for example, or Scott Pilgrim’s daily routines and personal anxieties being narrated by Gravelly Voiceover Man. The film’s success in capturing pop-culture minutiae from across multiple mediums is probably largely due to Edgar Wright – a perfect match of a director for a project if ever there was one, given that Wright tread similar territory in his excellent UK TV series, Spaced. Scott Pilgrim VS the World is a film that simultaneously captures the spirit of the source material while exploring the new possibilities that a different medium opens up.
But while in terms of quality I’d say the films Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World are about equal, what set Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life apart from Kick-Ass the comic for me was that there was a spirit there for the film to capture. The relationship between film and comic is not as symbiotic as it is with Kick-Ass. Bryan Lee O’Malley created a unique world with its own rules, meant specifically for the comic page. He wrote it, and he drew it, he created this comic book world, with no thought to a movie.
So what of this world that O’Malley has created? This is a world where Amazon delivery girls take shortcuts through people’s dreams, where bad guys can use mystical powers to summon bat-winged demon girls to their aid and burst into coins when they die, and where bands can play songs with specific note combinations that will render their entire audience unconscious “for 20-30 minutes”. All with no real explanation, and seemingly just taken for granted by the characters. Note how unsurprised everyone seems to be when Matthew Patel bursts through the roof of the Rockit club and starts trying to kill Scott:
And that’s perhaps what makes all this craziness feel so crazy, when it might not seem so unusual if it were to happen in a superhero book: a lot of it just comes out of left-field in a story that otherwise seems so grounded in the humdrum regular world. Like how explosions and car chases may be par for the course in a James Bond film, but we may have been surprised (and may have enjoyed the films more) if they turned up in the Sex and the City series. One possible explanation crops up on page 10 of Chapter 4: Ramona Come Closer:
SCOTT: Well… my last job is a really long story, filled with sighs. Maybe we can get into it in a later volume.
RAMONA: I don’t even want to talk about my last job.
SCOTT: Maybe volume three for that one.
It’s almost as if Scott Pilgrim and all the people around him are aware that they are in a comic book, and as such freely incorporate comic book elements such as supervillains and epic battles into their everyday love story when they feel the tools available to them in a regular comedy or drama are not sufficient to express the emotions they are experiencing.
Now, I don’t want to go into too much detail on the comics themselves, in case you guys do want to hold a meeting looking at the rest of the series in more depth, so I’ll steer things back towards how this relates to the movie. With Kick-Ass, you had a comic that felt rough, flawed and incomplete, like a template for the movie, and as such I said the movie felt more like the “real” Kick-Ass, with the comic simply serving to point us towards that movie. With Scott Pilgrim VS the World, I think the opposite is the case. The movie is great, but the comics are so detailed and intricate and idiosyncratic, with even minor characters having their own little tangential storylines going on, that a movie can only hope to provide a sampler of the world Bryan Lee O’Malley created. Scott Pilgrim VS the World is great, but the “real” Scott Pilgrim remains in the comics. The movie is crafted in a way that rather than feeling like it’s the refined, superior end product to the comic work in progress, instead we are pointed back to the comics where we can immerse ourselves deeper in the richness of the world and learn more about these characters we glimpsed on the big screen. It’s a more circular relationship between film and comics, with the comics exciting us for the possibility of the film, but the film also pointing us back towards the comics.
To go back to Mark Millar’s predictions on the future of comic book movies, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life is a very modern comic book. While classic, iconic superheroes may have been influenced by the pulp heroes of the 20s and 30s, Scott Pilgrim is a hero influenced not only by those earlier comic book superheroes, but by video game heroes (both platform games and beat-em-ups), and by 90s slacker culture. Both Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim VS the World represent comic book movies based on new ideas, celebrations of original ideas and approaches rather than adhering to the Superhero Origin Story mould. If the relatively poor box office doesn’t dissuade film studios and they start seeking out more alternative voices from the comic book world, perhaps then filmmakers and audiences will appreciate more that comic books are a medium, not a genre, and that they can be a fertile ground for film adaptation beyond just rebooting and redoing the superhero franchises that have already been hit movies.
Meeting #34
This meeting was light on the reading front because we have a mighty pile of reading waiting for you next meeting. And all of it from the same creator – Jeff Lemire, a Canadian writer/artist who has made a name for himself on the indie scene over this decade. We’re going to take a look at his work, and identify what themes and techniques are most prominent throughout. And as Lemire find his status in the industry growing - with his own Vertigo title and now work writing within the DC Universe – what defining aspects of his early work have carried over into the mainstream?
RECOMMENDED READING
The Complete Essex County
Jeff Lemire
The Nobody
Jeff Lemire
Sweet Tooth: Out of the Deep Woods
Jeff Lemire
Meeting #35
The Killing Joke
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel
Loki