by Brian Lee O’Malley
This is not a comic, per se, but a series of notes about Scott Pilgrim, the widely revered but chronically late Oni Press series. References explained, “how I came up with this,” what’s based on reality, etc.: trivia, essentially. Whether you want to read this or not depends on how obsessed you are with Scott Pilgrim. You’ll either be delighted or bored, and you know who you are. Attempting to summarize the contents would be futile: suffice it to say that there are a lot more video game references hidden in Pilgrim’s pages that I ever would have caught.
What I would like to single out for praise is the format: a deliberately difficult to obtain mini-comic released a generous duration after the book. There’s a lot of temptation to annotate one’s own work: it’s fun and easy, after all. Most web comic reprints seem to come with a little sidebar explaining the joke it’s next to, or just chatting amiably about it, and the vice is not restricted to web comics: Terry Moore’s Paradise, Too and Marvel’s moronically misnamed “director’s cut” editions are two other examples. These are comics that come with their own criticism.
I have nothing against criticism (I am, after all, a critic), but the blurring of text and criticism is, I think, misguided. After you read a text you should have some time to mull it over before having someone stride into the room cocksure and explain the thing to you. The fact that the critic is the author himself gives the criticism the appearance of added weight; is this explanation part of the piece itself, like Alan Moore’s notes to From Hell? or is it an afterthought, like a DVD director’s commentary?
Umberto Eco once wrote that a title should muddle a reader’s thinking, not regiment it, and this stricture should apply, I think, to all paratext. It’s no good starting a book with an introduction that tells you what the book will be about, and ending it with notes that tell you what the book was about. With that much bread in the sandwich, there’s no room for the meat.
Perhaps it’s best if an author does not comment on a book for ten or twenty years. If Alan Moore wanted to annotate Watchmen now (fat chance), I cannot begrudge him that, any more than I can begrudge Chester Brown his recent annotation to Ed the Happy Clown. But if the distancing effect of time is too much to ask for, at least give us the distancing effect of distance: separate the notes from the text, clearly label them as different animals. Criticism should be difficult to obtain, necessitating poring over the heavy volumes of the Contemporary Literary Criticism series, or better yet digging through musty bound journals in the forgotten rooms of the library; the time spent looking for it forces the reader to ruminate on the actual text, before having his reading compromised by another’s. Hats off to Brian Lee O’Malley for making The Annotated Pilgrim as distant from the text and hard to find as criticism ought to be.
Of course, in a couple of weeks it will be scanned and up on the internet, but that’s nobody’s fault but our own.
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