Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The fourth volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series opens with an eight-page colour section. While this series works perfectly in black and white, the colour by Steve Buccellato is a revelation in story terms as suddenly you can tell the characters apart very easily by hair colour and slight variations in skin tone as Scott and the gang hang out on the beach.

That intro done, the rest of the book is back to the usual greys, as in preceding volume Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness. The tone of the book takes a slightly more considered turn in this volume as Scott Pilgrim must finally make some moves towards stability in his life, finding a job, moving out of the crummy cheap apartment he shares with Wallace Wells, and getting seriously committed to Ramona. And of course he has to battle and defeat the next opponent from the League of Ex-Boyfriends. An additional complication is that there seems to be more than one mysterious adversary this time around – why is he being followed by ninjas? Scott is as distracted and clueless as ever, thinking about every activity as a variant of gaming – he can only understand his new job working in a restaurant by comparing it to the Final Fantasy “job system”– and his general air of confusion only deepens when a girl from his past turns up to complicate his feelings for Ramona, who coincidentally has her own visitor.

O’Malley’s series, just past the halfway point, increases the focus on character growth in this volume as Scott Pilgrim really does try to get it together. It’s funny and weirdly unpredictable, the drawing is getting nicer and the dialogue is always very witty and quotable. Scott himself is still an unusual protagonist who is somewhat blank at times, but if you’ve enjoyed the series this far, the slightly slower pace of this volume will be a welcome chance to spend more time just hanging with the characters as they go about their (slightly bizarre) daily lives.

In 2013, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together was given a deluxe upgrade and reissued in a new hardback edition, larger in size and in full colour throughout. The new colour hardcover also includes over twenty pages of extras featuring original sketches and designs for the series. Readers new to this series may find it more appealing than the original black and white softcover version. The series continues with Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe.