DEC - Seconds

December review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2014: Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley, 2014. [Graphic Novel category]

I devoured Scott Pilgrim when the graphic novels came out. I inhaled them. I loved them and read them multiple times, and then fell madly in love with the movie when Edgar Wright released it unto the world in 2010. I've been Ramona Flowers for Halloween multiple years in a row--you don't spend that many hours making a duct tape subspace purse not to use it at every opportunity, amirite?? Needless to say, Brian Lee O'Malley's head has always been a great place for me to be, and I was beyond pumped when I read that his newest (standalone) graphic novel would be coming out this year. Still in the graphic style we all know and love, Seconds is a new kind of story about young adult angst and getting your shit together. There's a quote from Guillermo del Toro on the back of the dust cover of my edition that reads, "In Seconds, Bryan Lee O'Malley plays the angst of youth against the fabric of a larger epic. In doing so, he enriches both." I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. The story is about Katie, a chef currently living above the first restaurant she started while she's waiting for her new restaurant to be finished. It's about a girl who pretty much has things together, but her obsession with these mushrooms that allow you essentially a "do-over" causes her to attempt to change every little thing, each time waking up in a slightly new version of her world. As she attempts to adapt, things get stranger and stranger and the house spirit whose mushrooms they are gets angrier and angrier. Katie doesn't understand why, and she continues on, bull-headedly, making things that she doesn't understand worse.
When writing reviews, I learned that it's always best to talk about the setpieces in movies, which are storylines or thinks that are integral to the storyline, without which the story built around them would fall apart. The setpieces in Seconds are the restaurant(s), the dresser on which Lis first appears to Katie, the mushrooms themselves. Whatever else changes in the storylines, these things always exist. Katie moves through her revisions, as she tries to make her errors right, fixing small things that have larger repercussions, trying to get her life and her restaurants and her relationship *just* right. And it all goes to hell. There is an element of the fabulous in this tale, and its casualness makes it all the more entertaining for it. O'Malley has certainly retained the glory that made Scott Pilgrim into the cult classic it was; his talent hasn't diminished with time. His witticisms (some even breaking the fourth wall), his careful scene construction with multiple panels in a row that may not contain any text whatsoever but simply emotion, his imaginative plot impetus--these are all things that work well for this story and that cement my reaction to it.
And of course, good ol' Brian Lee O'Malley, paying homage to everyone's beloved Scott Pilgrim in my favorite part of the entire book:

It is clearly a favorite joke, executed brilliantly by Michael Cera in the film, and I was more than a little amused to have it snuck into this new endeavor. And somehow, it still works here. In all actuality, I feel like that's sort of what Katie's story is about: taking her old life and trying to make it fit with this new one she's creating or forging. Her speech at the end to the demon-y house spirit rings true for someone unsure how to move forward without making innumerable mistakes, and ultimately the endgame message is that those mistakes are inevitable, innumerable, unavoidable, and meant to be cherished. Lived through and learned from. A message that, while a tad heavy, is something we could all stand to remember from time to time, especially at the junctures in our lives where a choice could send us down one of any number of branches, just like in the story. (Also, if anyone is interested, I really enjoyed reading this review of Seconds, by Douglas Wolk from Comics Alliance.)