You gotta have friendship and courage and whatever!

That's a line from Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, the first in a graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Scott is a slacker Canadian guy. He's bassist in a band called Sex Bob-Omb, and he plays a lot of computer games. We know that Scott plays computer games, because the plot of this novel makes NO SENSE unless you yourself have a solid grounding in old-school computer game logic. (What happens to the corpses of your slain enemies? They turn into coins. Of course.)

One way to read Scott Pilgrim is this: his life is a video game, and the rules of video games apply. For instance, he's just met this amazing woman named Ramona Flowers; but if he wants to date her, he must battle her Seven Evil Exes.

Maybe there's a second way to read Scott Pilgrim. Maybe the novel presents the intersection between reality and Scott's overactive imagination. In his ongoing fantasy, his life is a video game. In reality, he has to adjust to the fact that Ramona has a past. Ramona has not been a princess in a tower, waiting to be rescued; she has experience, and she has baggage. How will Scott deal with all those exes? His own insecurity? Will he rethink his expectations of women? Will he examine the way that he's treated girls in the past? Will it help to engage in a fantasy that turns these real-life issues into a video game quest?

Or maybe I'm subjecting a fun graphic novel to a little too much examination. However you look at them, these books are exciting and weird and laugh-out-loud funny, and if I were you I'd read them all. Titles in the series are:

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe
Scott Pilgrim in his Finest Hour

P.S. I liked the movie, too.