A Conversation With Bryan Lee O'Malley

Last month, shortly before the midnight debut of Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, I interviewed Bryan Lee O'Malley for Toronto's Globe & Mail. The resulting article ended up appearing nearly a month later, coinciding with film adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World instead - blame the vagaries of newspapers - and at less than half of its original length. That's not unusual when you're slinging copy around, but it meant that the vast majority of O'Malley's charming, pithy and illuminating answers went unprinted, so I'm putting them here. A few questions dealing with movie-or-plot-related minutiae have been omitted for redundancy, and I forgot to hit "record" for several minutes at the beginning because I'm an idiot, but otherwise this transcript is only lightly edited. I also recommend this interview of Mal by Joe McCulloch, which delves more deeply into his background and artistic influences.

[NB: This post initially had my questions in bold and the responses in plain text, but I've reversed that formatting after a few people told me it was hard to read.]

***

CR: I want to talk about the new backgrounds, because they’re great. And I kind of feel like everyone in American comics should hire an assistant to draw these crazy, Taniguchi-style backgrounds. There should be a government program for that.

BLOM: I know, there should be an apprenticeship thing. That’d be awesome.

And there’s really – there’s some bold angles in there, there’s huge swathes of negative space on some pages, um, yeah…I guess I don’t have a question there, but could you talk about any of those things?

Did you read a printout, or did you read an actual hard copy of the book?

I read a printout.

I was starting the book, I think I had drawn, like, the first few pages or whatever, and I was like “oh my god, I’m never going to finish it in time.” I think I started it in October and then I had made no progress by December because I was just busy with other stuff. So then I was like, okay, I’m going to try and find someone to help me…So I ended up finding this guy John Kantz, he used to do a book for Antarctic Press, and he’s really talented. He has the whole skillset. He had no job, basically. He’d been laid off and he needed money, so I’m just like “I have some money now,” so I offered him the job. Aesthetically that’s just like – if I had, if there were two of me, I’d be spending this much time on the backgrounds. But there never have been before.

What was it like wrangling a couple of assistants? Obviously you did that kind of work yourself back in the day when you were starting out…

Yeah…We decided to kind of figure out the parameters of what I was doing and what he was doing. So at first I was taking on most of the workload and he would just – he did all the tones, but he was only doing little bits of the background at the beginning, and then as it goes on he’s taking on more and more. I kind of always knew that would be the case, because I knew he had complicated stuff towards the end of the book. I think it worked out. The other thing is that my art has always been so inconsistent, I mean, to my eyes, that I don’t feel like it’s jarring to have slightly more inconsistency in your stuff with three people.

[Mal had to excuse himself for a moment at this point, because his dog peed on the floor]

I thought you’d said your dog was on the floor and I was kind of horrified – like, his legs had collapsed or something.

[laughs]

My family’s dog is 14 now, so I’m paranoid about these things. Um, that vaguely ties in to the next thing I was going to ask, which is…I think there’s a loose consensus that your cartooning leapt really far ahead between the third and fourth volumes – it became cleaner, more stylized, there was less shading on the characters, or no shading at all, and I think the linework was obviously tighter. Do you agree with that? What would you ascribe it to, if so?

I think it starts to move that way in the second half of the third book, but then at the end of the third book I was really really rushing so it just looked crappier. But in the fourth book – I took a little longer between books that time, and in subsequent books I’ve always done that, just taking a longer time to write the script. And then when I got back into it I was drawing at a larger size, so I think that’s really what people are seeing. I’ve been drawing a lot bigger, so it looks a lot cleaner when I shrink it down. And then in subsequent books I kind of went back to a smaller – at least in book six I went back to a smaller size, but I retained that skill level, so it looks pretty good.

One thing that really struck me was those three consecutive blanks pages in the middle of the book…And it seems like there are more extended wordless sequences.

Yeah, I mean, I always knew I wanted it to be longer, so I wrote the script and then when I was breaking it down I gave myself room for that sort of thing.

How has your scripting changed throughout the series? I read that you’ve written full scripts since the very first volume, but it seems like the individual chapters have maybe become more self-contained over time?

I feel like that was really mostly only five and six, but it probably started in four. But yeah, I felt like I wanted each chapter to be more satisfying. For one thing it’s really hard to just write a whole book without some kind of breaking points like that. Just in terms of how I wanted to tell the story it started to evolve. I didn’t like the transitions in volume three, it just kind of blurs together. I wanted to have more discrete units within the story. Especially in volume six – I guess volume five and six – each chapter has a specific goal, one thing to tell you, and then it moves on to the next thing.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (vol. 6)

Even though you’ve been introducing these downbeat moments and emotional complications for at least a couple of volumes now, I was still a little surprised by how messed-up Scott is at the beginning of this one. He’s in a dark place, or at least a humiliating one. And there’s those really skeezy scenes with Knives and Envy…

Yeah. I don’t know, I kind of wanted to pull the rug out a little from Scott’s view of himself. In the first book at least people are kind of alluding to Scott being a jerk…Now we’re seeing a little bit of the potential for that within Scott. Or just being a clueless jerk at times.

Yeah. I think especially during the final three volumes you sometimes highlight the limitations of the central metaphor of your own series, the video-game thing. The dangers of mythologizing your whole life like this. Like when Gideon says he altered Scott’s memories to be more action-packed and less ambiguous.

Yeah.

He does use a power-up to come back to life at the big climax, but he and Ramona basically destroy Gideon’s hold on them with empathy rather than…cool new weapons. Or I guess empathy unlocks cool new weapons?

It is a cool new weapon [laughs].

I don’t know, like I said, there isn’t a question mark on the end of that. But maybe you could…speak to that?

I agree! I think that’s what I was going for, so I’m glad it’s coming across.

It’s tricky, I guess, because – that central metaphor is really powerful as well. But maybe you have to question it implicitly.

Yeah, I like to poke at it.

One thing I noticed is that Gideon is the only character in his thirties. He actually happens to share the same age as you. And that seemed – not that he shares your age, but that he’s in his thirties, that seemed integral to me, because in this book he comes off as a depressing, twisted corruption of adulthood. Like…I don’t know, Norman Osborn in Spider-man.

Yeah, he’s – that’s what Scott would be like if he grew up and became an asshole. Scott is like me when I started the book, and Gideon is like me when I’ve finished the book. That was intentional, definitely, giving him my age…His glasses are [like mine].

I like that Gideon’s approach to relationships is one that a Final Fantasy villain would have. Obviously I should build this giant machine and keep all the girls who got away in there!

Originally I was going to give him – he was gonna have evil exes of his own, he was going to have monuments to them or statues or something, but I realized he should actually have the girls. It’s a metaphor for – he says it straight up, they’re the girls who got away. You’re holding on to this image of a girl where it didn’t work out, and you’re waiting for this future carefree day when she’ll actually like you or whatever.

He’s this powerful, successful guy, but he’s also petty and controlling and vindictive.

Yeah. And he’s been jilted a lot of times. Guys who go through that get this kind of self-righteous quality to them, I think.

I like how even as the evil exes are still caricatures of horrible boyfriends or romantic partners or whatever, they become – they’re not one-dimensional. Sometimes they’re sad or tragic in some way.

I kind of wish I had explored that more on some occasions. I always feel like I gave them short shrift. I was not that interested in the evil exes throughout the series, which I guess makes sense – I’m trying to concentrate on the core characters and the actual relationship.

You could always do Scott Pilgrim Gaiden.

It’ll be like – Stephenie Meyer, she rewrote Twilight from Edward Cullen’s point of view. One volume from each evil ex’s point of view.

Were there any new influences that you internalized while drawing the final book? Envy reminded me of some Junko Mizuno characters in the final volume, but that could just be my own dirty mind.

Oh, stylistically? I guess I’ve still been on this ‘70s/'80s manga kick, Envy definitely looks like that. And the eyes have gotten even bigger, I think, they’re a little more chibified…But I don’t know, I’m too busy working to actually read a lot of comics. Or to actually apply influences. It’s all kind of evolved in this weird natural way. Everyone looks really different now than they did in volumes one and two. Knives Chau is just, like – completely chibified eyes now.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

It seems like the general manga influence, the shonen influence, has become more central to the series. Volume one especially looks sort of, kind of, like a scratchy American indie comic?

Yeah, the initial fight in volume one, it’s this really rough imitation of shonen manga. And that has become a lot more central, yeah. I think I’ve actually read a lot more of it at this point. At that point it was almost just an idea to me, I had just kind of heard of shonen manga and only read a little bit of it.

The fact that Gideon opens up his sinister, decadent lair, his Legend of Zelda boss lair, at–

At this homeless shelter.

Yeah, the corner with all the junkies and homeless people at Queen & Bathurst! It plays into all those debates about gentrification, and…

Yeah, totally. And Gideon is, you know, this American guy coming to town and making his own luxury bullshit…I can tell you my new metaphorical structure for the book, based on last year. Gideon is Edgar, and I’m Envy. He came back to town and started this whole industry, and gave people jobs, and pushed everything around to feed ourselves. I was just kind of along for the ride. So yeah, I feel like in this book I identified most with Envy Adams, which is truly disturbing.

[laughs] I love the psychosexual implications of that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of psychosexual implications in that.

I was gonna do a promo strip for the book that was…all these Toronto luminaries gushing about Gideon coming to town…It was gonna be, like, Chris Murphy and all that kind of stuff.

Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood [laughs]. People saying what a genius he is and stuff. I should still do that, it’d be fun.

Do you post on message boards or try to follow what people are saying online? Obviously you have the Twitter, and that’s pretty busy, but do you do anything otherwise?

Well, I have my own forum, it’s relatively populated with a fanatical group of kids. So I go on there regularly and see what their new kooky theories are.

I like the generational aspect of it.

The whole internet thing is – even just everything. In 2004 I didn’t have a cell phone, I don’t think there was such a thing as Wikipedia, there’s a lot of stuff like that. Even the Nintendo DS was not introduced until after the first couple books.

One thing I noticed – mostly I’m saying this because you tore apart that page from volume three on your blog recently, the layout or composition of it. But I’ve seen a couple of other interviews where you’re pretty…self-critical about how you were drawing in the first volumes. Not in a reflexive, Chris Ware, “I suck” way but in a detailed–

Exactly what I was doing wrong, yeah.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

I’m guessing Oni is gonna try and repackage the books, after the movie comes out – the spines don’t match, for one thing – so have you thought about going back and…not redrawing them, but altering them in some way?

Yeah, a little bit. Someone asked me about this yesterday, but I’ve always felt that if you go too far in that direction then it’s just, that’s the end—

You become George Lucas.

You become George Lucas. Yes. So I’m saying to myself that I will only go and edit things for clarity and consistency – there’s a few panels where Scott’s hairline is radically different in the first half of the first book…I’m gonna try and stick to that rule. I probably will change a few things when we repackage them inevitably.

The spines were designed by someone else originally, and I was never really happy with it.

Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure Seth is one of the only cartoonists who obsessively design all of their own books.

I’m the shitty Seth. I’m the computer version of Seth [Chris laughs, a lot].

I’m assuming that you can’t say much about your next project yet, but do you have a firm idea of what it’ll be? Are you far long in the preliminary stages?

Um…no, not really. I just haven’t really had time to devote to it. I have two or three things that kind of brewed during Scott Pilgrim. Some of them date back to the very – like, between the first and second book I had some ideas. Some of them have been simmering for five years. It’s very complicated to actually turn those things that mean something to me, that have been evolving in my mind, and turn them into actual words on paper. It’ll probably take a while. I’ve realized I have to lay low for a bit after this is all done.

I remember there was an aborted side project years and years ago, Street Stupid.

Yeah, that was between two and three. That one in particular – I was kind of pressured to try and pitch something else, because it was when the Scott Pilgrim movie was starting to snowball a little bit, and…“We can sell something else!” And I was like, “Uhhhnnnnn, sure, whatever.” It just wasn’t working…I canned it, and ideas from it will go into whatever I do for my next book, but I don’t think I’ll do anything under that title.

I saw the transcript of that SPX interview you did with Joe McCulloch from a year or two ago, and I think you mentioned wanting to draw more webcomics?

Yeah. That’s the one thing from that interview that is no longer true. For a while I was like, “yeah, webcomics, that must be the future,” but it just seems that they’re…illegitimate? That people don’t take them seriously? I could do the next Scott Pilgrim as a webcomic and it would get a million readers, but Quill & Quire would not review it.

Even some critics who know a lot about comics and write smartly about them don’t seem to follow – I kind of hate myself for not following webcomics enough.

There’s so much.

Oh yeah. And it’s like its own little scene, I mean, not a little scene, but…

It’s weird. A lot of my friends are web cartoonists, and they’re really talented, and a lot of them are getting book deals or whatever, but it seems like you have to get a book deal in the end anyway. The main reason I look at webcomics is because of serialization, because, you know, print is dying and all this shit. The other reason I started moving to the chapter-to-chapter format is because I find it really hard to conceptualize a whole book. I’d like to try serializing, it’d be fun, but I don’t really like the comic book format in America. I don’t know any other venue, other than the web.

from "Bear Creek Apartments," script by Hope Larson

That one you did with Hope [Larson, O'Malley's wife, a cartoonist and screenwriter] was great, but it also took months to complete, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of actual time it took me a week, I was just doing it in between other stuff.

And you don’t – you have no desire to work on any specific film stuff, right? Unless it’s an adaptation of something you already drew?

Umm…I don’t have a problem with the idea of it. I would like writing more, because comics take so long. I feel like I could bang out scripts for other stuff in between if I felt like it. I’m working on a strip with a friend, and I’ll see how that goes…

I think one overlooked aspect of Scott Pilgrim, or your work in general, is how much they’re informed by female cartoonists or comics aimed at girls and women.

I consider myself a feminist to some degree, and I would like comics to be more female-friendly. It’s something I’ve been grappling with over the course of the series. I’ve definitely seen female bloggers or whatever completely dismiss the series based on its premise, and think it’s some kind of chauvinist bullshit world, but hopefully it’s not.

…I don’t know if I have many or any questions left. Is there something you want to say about the final book or the series in general that I didn’t get around to?

Um…I have no idea [both laugh].

I’m kind of fascinated by the idea of aging over the course of the series…The idea of maturity, maybe. There’s even…self-mockery of that? They play a really bad cover of “I’m a Believer,” like you would in a shitty romantic comedy. But the basic idea…that’s what they’re talking about in the elevator at the end, right? This idea of change.

Change, yeah. Of evolution. That’s what my own views have come to be, so I was just kind of espousing my own views, I guess, like all cartoonists tend to eventually do. They have their own take on it, but that scene is kind of…I mean, it was hard to write, obviously, but it is definitely pulling back the curtain a little bit.

from Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (vol. 4)

So Scott is basically speaking for you there, in that monologue?

So is she. It’s kind of like an argument in my own head.

And then the final, final scene leaves it a little ambiguous as to exactly what they’re doing.

Yeah.

Which is nice. That’s supposed to be in Toronto, right, that weird hill?

Yeah, it’s supposed to be the park from the first book, but it’s…it’s drawn better [laughs].

[after rambling about Kim Pine’s kindred spirit Neko Case for a while] I guess…I…don’t have anything else!

I still can’t really comprehend the book. We just saw the movie yesterday and we can’t comprehend it either, because it’s…the fact that it was filmed in my old neighbourhood, and kind of based on weird versions of scenes from my own life…

How there’s a version of Michael Comeau in a Hollywood movie?

Yeah, exactly. It’s very weird for me to watch. I haven’t seen it with an audience of people who are not me yet, so I think that’ll make it easier. That’ll be like a mediation of it – just hearing people’s reactions, people who don’t have any association with it or baggage attached. Right now all I can watch is the scenes that have nothing to do with me. It’s like I can only enjoy those scenes fully.

I’m really interested to see how Toronto reacts to it specifically, because – I think Scott Pilgrim is part of the general comics zeitgeist in this past decade, maybe the representative series from what a younger generation of North Americans are doing. But also I think it was part of a smaller local thing in Toronto, starting around 2002 or 2003…celebrating or mythologizing [the city].

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of accidentally was in the right place at the right time. People always ask me about Toronto, what it is about Toronto, questions like that, and I’ve never really had a statement. I guess Scott Pilgrim is my statement on Toronto. I don’t think it’s conclusive in any way, but…I only lived there for three, four years. I just happened to be there. I was nobody. It was really weird to go back last year and be introduced to Chris Murphy and Broken Social Scene and all those guys, to have them be like: “Where did you hang out? Why didn’t we know you?” Because I was a fucking nerdy cartoonist! That’s why you didn’t know me, I’m not a rock star.

[laughs] That’s great. I think it’s because Toronto is a really big city, but one that didn’t – I mean, it’s not like New York, where there’s whole layers of lore…

It doesn’t have that weird history, that mythologized history that New York has or L.A.

The mystique, where all these young smart people want to go there and [emulate] Woody Allen or Martin Scorcese or Jay-Z.

I’ve always been intimidated by New York for that reason, because there’s too many stories. It’s been [so] fictionalized that I can’t really comprehend it.

And L.A., in a different sense, the glitzy sense. But Toronto didn’t have – it had boring, conservative Protestantism…

Conservative white people, yeah.

But there was all this raw material.

Yeah, and I feel like I’ve maybe unfairly mythologized Toronto. I’ve definitely seen kids being like: “I want to move to Canada now!” And, um…it’s cool, but it’s just a city.

from Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (vol. 3)