Last week on America's birthday I reviewed the first volume of the Scott Pilgrim saga with Canadian hero Scott Pilgrim. For whatever reason, my love of the first volume was just fanatical enough for me to rush out and buy the second volume the very next day. The only other comic series I actually collected was Hellsing and I didn't buy it as fast as I did with Scott Pilgrim but enough of my fanatical love. So let's get going with the continuation of the Scott Pilgrim saga with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
If you remember the first volume, our intrepid Canadian hero Scott Pilgrim, had a nice life dating high-schooler Knives Chau. Then with some wacky subspace traveling he meets Ramona Flowers and it's love at first sight. But Ramona has these Seven Evil Exes that Scott must defeat if he wants to keep dating her. Now with one out of the way Scott must prepare himself against the second Evil Ex, action star Lucas Lee. Also, there's something going on with one of Scott's exes calling him so his band can open up for her band and even more also, Scott must break up with Knives.
Right away I noticed something different in how this volume was written in relation to the first volume. It doesn't go for jokes all the time like in Airplane! Don't get me wrong, it's still light-hearted and jokey but each joke is integrated into the story instead of being a non sequitur. However, I liked the first volume's irreverence and jokey manner a bit more than I do here. It was much more entertaining that way but I'm not saying that this new style is bad but I felt it did miss one good opportunity. At one point Scott and Ramona are watching one of Lucas Lee's horrible action movies for Scott's training to defeat him. It shows a few scenes and a few pieces of dialogue but it doesn't go far enough to get a good feel. I love action movies, I want to see a good send-up which this doesn't really follow through on which is a bit of a shame.
But before I whine on how this volume isn't as funny as the first one for too long, I will say that it does show some growth for Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author. This time he's able to blend his love of video games, fights, love and cool gay roommates into a cohesive whole...for a part of the saga or something like that. There's a whole bunch of threads that are open up here and they all intertwined where we see character relations and how everyone does relate to each other. It leads to me seeing this guys in a much different light than just characters that do and say funny things. One last thing, with this new maturation comes much better fight scenes. The first volume's fight with Matthew Patel was kinda weak with stuff happening that didn't really make any sense but in this volume all the fights make sense. Each punch, each hit and each use of illegal weaponry are clear and important for each scene. It's a real pleasure to see these fights.
So while this volume of Scott Pilgrim is better crafted and better written, it's not as entertaining as Volume 1. I miss its jokey-ness, I miss its irreverence and I miss its go-for-broke attitude. But it's only a step below Volume 1 and one step below really awesome is still awesome, just not as awesome.
8/10
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