I love your term “punk lite” in your pitch of this. I grew up in the Alternative era (for a while it was called Modern Rock before the term “indie” came around). It was very much a punk-lite, goth adjacent vibe. I was in a bad garage rock band that only played one show (my high school graduation party).
I was a nerd who aspired to be cool in an era when you definitely could not be publicly both. I never cared about being popular, but I desperately wanted to be cool. So in college I put away the D&D books (only to find years later that some of my closest friends were also closet D&D nerds and we should have been playing the whole time!) and started listening to Brian Eno and hosting wine & cheese parties and trying to be grown up and artsy. I was using my overactive imagination to try and be a novelist instead of playing with action figures (It took me twenty years to learn that running role playing games is much closer to the latter, and much more fulfilling for me.)
As a smart, sheltered Catholic school boy in a small decaying rust-belt city it was hard to get to even a rough approximation of the kind of cool I wanted to be around. Everyone weird enough to be attractive was by definition a social outcast, so the best I could do was find a collection of different semi-cool-adjacent people that didn’t really fit together to hang out with.
In college, when I visited Washington DC and New York City, I realized those places were where I had always wanted to be and contained the sort of people I aspired to be. (Of course, when I did move to New York City, I realized that I would never be able to be cool enough to hang around the scene I aspired to.)
What I’m getting at is that Scott Pilgrim documents a scene about 8-10 years after my scene, but kind of similar to what I wanted to be a part of. The comic really captures the mood of dudes in their early twenties who know they ought to have broken out of the adolescent mindset by now but can’t quite bring themselves to. I dated a 17-year-old when I was 20, which was somewhat awkward but not as yikes as Scott being 23. I really struggled after that breakup and my next girlfriend was Elizabeth (though I didn’t have to fight her evil ex-boyfriends).
I like that the comic gets across that almost everyone in the scene is totally anxious that they’re not actually cool enough to be hanging out with everyone else (except Ramona, who is obviously on another level). But I worry over whether any of the characters will grow up enough to be worth spending all the time with. They are realistic early-twenties people and that’s not a period I have a lot of desire to relive. Scott himself is posed as both a hero and a dingus, but it’s hard to know if the author is self-aware enough to really pull that off.
The whole shift into shonen manga/video game fighting/bollywood dance at the end made me wonder “why didn’t you lead with that, if this is what this is going to be?” The gender politics of fighting for the prize of dating a girl (especially on top of the whole 23-year-old dating a 17-year-old) is not super promising, and the sort of anime + NES type references slide off me because of my age. But at the same time, I’d also had about enough of Scott’s simultaneous laziness and try-hard-ness, so the shift was welcome.
I love the art, and it gives off a very strong mood. The coloring is great, though I think it would look awesome in black-and-white, too. (I was there for the black-and-white boom of the 1980s.) And I kind of get what it’s trying to do mixing the mundane setting of Canadian indie rock with more magical/sci-fi/anime stuff. But I don’t think that mixing works super well. It’s too well grounded to take off.
Maybe I’m judging it too hard because it feels too close, just as I judge myself too hard.