Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim continues to obliviously sleepwalk through most of his life, but is a fine fighter when necessary.  I appreciated Ramona taking up arms alongside him this time around.  I also found myself relieved to see that she could be equally oblivious and thoughtless as it makes their romance seem far more plausible and deserved.

A consistent conclusion for this surreal, slacker comic series.

Runaways: Homeschooling, by Kathryn Immonen & Sara Pichelli

Runaways is one of the few in-production comics that I'm currently reading.  It's a superhero comic so each of the teenagers has something unrealistically special about them.  Despite that, they're portrayed as fairly normal teens, and I love their interpersonal dynamics.  I'm still bitter about one death earlier on in the series, and while I generally dislike plot twists that bring the presumed-dead back, I find myself uncharacteristically hoping for just that.

Thanks again to my dear colleague for keeping me up to date on Runaways, lending me his copies of the new releases so I don't have to wait for my library's acquisitions & cataloguing departments to do their time-consuming magic before I can read them.

Scott Pilgrim, by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I've been hearing raves about Scott Pilgrim for years, and after reading the first five volumes (the final volume comes out in July) I can see some of the appeal.  It's funny, and filled with stylized, over-the-top fight scenes that read like a teen daydream. 

Scott is a lazy slacker everyman who plays bass, shares a one-room apartment with his gay buddy, and can't hold down a job.  He is not a terribly sharp fellow, but manages to drift through life pretty comfortably.  Scott's persistence and nice-guy charm win him the attentions of the cute, mysterious Ramona, but he'll need to prove himself by defeating each of her seven evil exes if he wants to keep dating her.  While Scott is generally unskilled and oblivious, he shows some incongruous fighting talent and wits in battle.

My personal impression of the series is mixed.  I hold a grudge against Scott for his callous treatment of the highschool girl he's dating when he meets Ramona, and his oblivious slackerness irritates me.  However, the comic is a ridiculous romp through early adulthood and it works because it doesn't take itself too seriously.  I enjoyed the pop-culture references, descriptions of Toronto neighbourhoods, and the unselfconscious silliness.

I'm surprised there's no waitlist on these comics at my library yet, but they'll get very popular very fast when the film version hits the theatres in August.

The Eternal Smile, by Gene Luen Yang & Derek Kirk Kim

This is a pleasant read.  Three well-structured short stories with great illustrations.  Each section features a character orienting him or herself within the real world and imagined worlds.  Sometimes reality is not straightforward or even preferable.  My favourite was the last story, where an under-appreciated office worker pursues a love affair with the sender of a "Nigerian prince" bank fraud spammer.

Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales - Sanctuary (by Melissa Marr)

Desert Tales is a companion story to Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely novels.  In this literary universe, faeries are real, but only appear to those whom they choose to.  They are mischievous and often spiteful, best not tangled with.  Marr's stories all involve troubled romances between mortal humans and immortal faeries.  I enjoyed reading the first in the series which is one of this year's YRCA nominees, but I was less intrigued by the follow-up efforts as their character arcs were too similar to the first.

Fairies (or faeries) are second only to vampires when it comes to popular tropes in the teen urban fantasy / surreal romance genre.  Generally, I prefer Holly Black (Tithe, Valiant) to Melissa Marr (Wicked Lovely, Ink Exchange), as I find Black's characters are richer, and Marr's stories are more formulaic.  This graphic/manga adaptation will probably be popular, but it's too slow and fluffy for me.  This volume introduces the primary romance and potential conflict, but so little happens that it may take several volumes to reach any satisfactory story development.  I'd been hoping for something different; perhaps a stronger lead character, but Rika seems just like all the others in Melissa Marr's stories.  I'll leave this for the real romance junkies.     

NYX: No Way Home (by Marjorie Liu)

No Way Home loosely picks up where NYX: Wannabe left off, following a few teenaged mutants as they attempt to make a life for themselves under difficult circumstances.  The story is alright, but nothing terribly exciting. There isn't enough sense of where it's going to satisfy me.  Comic trade paperbacks work best when the arc captures a fully formed story, and this one feels  loose-endy.

For teenaged heroes, give me the Runaways anyday.