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Old 02-21-2014, 03:29 PM   #1
Spideristic
The Thunderbolts
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: India
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Seconds: A Graphic Novel (Bryan Lee O'Malley's follow up to Scott Pilgrim)

I was late to discover Scott Pilgrim; though I had read about the character, I didn't read the comics until 2010. I managed to read the comics in mid 2010 and avoided all the movie promos until I read all the 5 books. And then read the 6th (final) volume when it was released one month before the movie's release.

I loved the Scott Pilgrim comics and the characters created by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Loved the film and it was my #1 favourite movie of 2010. I have all the original black and white books, but I have yet to add the new colored hardcover versions to my collection. And now I am so looking forward to Seconds, which is getting released on July 15, 2014.

Seconds: A Graphic Novel: Bryan Lee O'Malley: 9780345529374: Amazon.com: Books



Seconds (B&N Exclusive Edition) by Bryan Lee O'Malley | 9780553394368 | Hardcover | Barnes & Noble



“In Seconds, Bryan Lee O’Malley plays the angst of youth against the fabric of a larger epic. In doing so, he enriches both. A great ride!” - Guillermo del Toro

“Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds is adorable, haunting, funny, and beautiful. A perfect recipe for a great graphic novel.” - Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics




Here are some details about the book Seconds, mentioned by Bryan in an interview back in 2012. You can read the full interview in the link below, where he also talks about the movie in retrospective and about the colored Scott Pilgrim comics.

Beyond the Many Lives of Scott Pilgrim | Hazlitt

What can you tell me about Seconds, if anything?

I came up with the general idea for Seconds right after completing the first volume of Scott Pilgrim. I worked in a restaurant in Toronto for a little while to pay the bills while writing the second volume and planning the rest of the series, and I had a few ideas for this other story, a story about a restaurant. So, Seconds is about a restaurant, and the restaurant is called Seconds, and 90 percent of the story takes place within it. Beyond that it’s really hard for me to explain and I’m going to have to work on that so I can talk about it properly when it comes out. But it’s funny and weird and kind of big and crazy despite the mundane setting.

So is Seconds a return to the more “realistic” style of Lost at Sea [O’Malley’s first, pre-Scott-Pilgrim book], or will there still be otherworldy elements like SP? Did you do any research on the restaurant industry beyond your own experiences? What’s the protagonist like?

People always ask whether the new book will be more like Lost at Sea or Pilgrim. Is this what they mean? Seconds is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there’s that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very strange, very mental. So it’s a little of both, I guess.

The protagonist, Katie, is a loveable spaz, and she’s in practically every panel; her personality drives the story in a way that’s basically identical to my other work. They’re all very subjective worlds. But this is a new subject, so it’s got its own feeling.


Researching restaurants is probably tastier than, say, American labour history. Have you found your style changing again in drawing it?

Well, on a new book, in a new world, it’s a clean break and I felt like I could push my art into new places. I can toss out intrinsic things about the Scott Pilgrim look that always bugged me over the years, and I can bring different influences to bear. I think the new book looks pretty different, but it’ll still be instantly recognizable as me. The layouts are very different. The characters are not a huge stretch from Scott Pilgrim, but then, they’re new characters.

Which influences do you mean, in this case? And how did the preliminary process differ? Seconds is a self-contained book, for one thing—did you write a more detailed script beforehand because of that?

Well, now I can aim more overtly for like a ‘70s/’80s manga style, like Rumiko Takahashi or Izumi Matsumoto, which mostly means bigger hair and “cuter” figures. But since I’m starting from scratch I can also play with European influences and stuff – I’ve had a crush on Christophe Blain’s work forever, and I’m obsessed with Kerascoet & Hubert’s Beauté, which I read in French last year.

As a set of ideas, Seconds had years to coalesce, but turning an idea into an actual functioning story engine is another thing entirely. I ended up writing it into a really detailed outline and composing comic pages directly from that outline. This is supposed to keep things fresher, but I won’t really know if it’s working until I’m all done.

What kind of extras do you have planned for the new editions? I remember you’ve mused about one day doing a “new saga” set in the Scott Pilgrim universe. Has going through this process quashed or fed that notion?

Comics take forever, even the remastering process is taking forever, and that’s always been my main impediment as far as doing “more” Scott Pilgrim. I have vague ideas for more stories, but I’d like to keep them vague for a few years and squelch those urges and try to get something new to take off in the same way with readers.

For extras, I’m just basically going back through all my old sketchbooks and scanning anything remotely interesting. The process stuff has to be interesting to someone. The first colour book actually includes the original pitch document for the series, which is mortifying, but whatever, it’s for posterity. Later books in the series will collect various short comics from over the years, and I’m hoping to do some “new” content in the second half of the series—basically starting when I finish Seconds. Most of the new content will be in the form of backstory or plot-hole-filling. I think that stuff will be a lot of fun, or anyway I hope to have a lot of fun with it.
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