Paige Jurgensen/Columnist

Between 2004 and 2010, author Bryan Lee O’Malley introduced the world to Scott Pilgrim and his group of diverse secondary characters.

The “Scott Pilgrim” series is a collection of six volumes, originally released in black and white but later released in full color. The comics follow a young bass player, Scott Pilgrim, who starts out his adventure by dating a seventeen year old schoolgirl turned groupie, Knives Chau, and trying to find success in his band Sex Bob-omb. Until one day he encounters a beautiful, alternative woman named Ramona Flowers.

For a bit, Scott juggles both Knives and Ramona, but eventually sticks with just Ramona. However, with all of Ramona’s great attributes, she does have one very small flaw: her evil exes. A group of seven evil exes actively try to stop Scott from being with Ramona from being together, so in order to further his relationship with Ramona, Scott must defeat all seven of the exes in battle.

The comic book series is visually based off of the Japanese manga style, which sparked a little bit of controversy saying that O’Malley was trying to “rip-off” or Westernize the style, however that eventually fizzled away. Japanese comic artists, such as Koji Aihara, defended O’Malley by stating “I did feel the inspiration from Japanese manga, but it did not strike me as a ripoff of manga style, but a very unique way of expression, I found it a very interesting work. I appreciated you using your own style of expression. Also, I thought your use of solid blacks was very skilled and attractive.”

The story of “Scott Pilgrim” was an immediate success. In 2005, O’Malley won the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent for “Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life,” the first volume of the series. Since 2005, O’Malley has just kept winning awards for the series. Overall, Scott Pilgrim was ranked number 69 in the 100 best comic book heroes and the series itself was number 85 on “The 200 Greatest Comic Books of All Time.”

The story of “Scott Pilgrim” is probably best known for the film adaption in 2010, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, starring Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers. The movie was a critical success and essentially the entire thing is gif-ed on Tumblr. Unlike most film adaptions of anything literary, the Scott Pilgrim movie stays fairly true to the original comic book story.

In addition, in 2010 “Scott Pilgrim” was released in video game form called Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. The video game, upon being released, was available for download for a reasonable price which allowed it to be played by a large audience and the game was reviewed positively by the critics.

Paige Jurgensen can be reached at [email protected]