DC Comics launches a cool .pdf guide to the world of Brian Wood’s DMZ.
Slate examines SCOTT PILGRIM, with a slide show that offers side-by-side panels and analysis of the series. Very impressive.
And, like manga characters, Scott Pilgrim and his friends become, in moments of high emotion, “super deformed”—extra-cartoony versions of themselves. In this panel from Hot Gimmick, a manga series by Miki Aihara, good-girl heroine Hatsumi goes super-deformed with shock when her neighbor Ryouki discovers the pregnancy test she has bought for her sister. Similarly, in Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, a super-deformed Wallace, Scott’s drunken roommate, begs Ramona for a favor. This heightened unreality serves the same purpose in Scott Pilgrim as it does in manga—to punctuate gags, yes, but also to move the books away from reality into a pop world all their own. You never forget while reading that Scott Pilgrim and his friends are cartoons.
