Here is how I decide what comics to buy. I keep my ear to the ground, listening to the reviews on iComics, Pipeline, Fourth Rail, and Ming the Merci… I mean Warren Ellis. So recently I heard the war drums beat a love song to Scott Pilgrim.

And it deserves every beat of those songs.

Scott Pilgrim is about a 20 something guitar-playing slacker, who lives with a gay roommate (they sleep in the same bed), and is dating a high-schooler. And then he meets the roller-skating delivery girl of his dreams - literally of his dreams. She uses his dreams as shortcuts to make her deliveries. He shortly discovers that in order to keep dating her he must face her League of Ex-boyfriends in physical combat. Logically, as he defeats each of them in Street Fighter style battles they drop coins and items that help him on his quest …

And I know how it sounds, and when you first look at the cartoony manga style artwork in the currently released two volumes (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), your first reaction is to dismiss it as an immature work.

You would be SO wrong.

Because with the insane fantasy elements of the story are characters, relationships, reactions, and dialogue that are as deep, funny, and real as any so called “mature” piece of fiction. Personally, I was actually moved when Scott had to dump his young Asian girlfriend just as she made a declaration of her deep love. Having gone through that earlier this year myself, the grey mood he finds himself immediately after was accurately represented.

Besides, the fight scenes and video game elements make the work further relatable to my generation. We grew up on that stuff and can’t help but feel the Scott’s thrill of earning a new prize, or finally learning how to play the Final Fantasy riff on his guitar. And the artwork is perfect for the story, mixing the fantasy with some surprisingly accurate detail in background and items. My only real complaint against it is that by the second volume too many (great) characters are introduced that look way too similar, so it starts to get hard to tell them apart.

The series has inspired my thoughts on what to write. A problem with a lot of my ideas is that the stories become too epic in scope, grand ideas that effect society and I get caught up in working all the details. Bryan Lee O’Malley (his blog is here, help the guy out by buying some artwork) has done something wonderful in Scott Pilgrim; using mechanics usually only found in stories of much larger scales (super-heroes) and use them to tell a smaller, personally story about a young man and love. Brilliant.

So what are you waiting for? Join the mob and read Scott Pilgrim .

And Bryan? Make the merchandise already!!! I want a shirt!!!