Last spring, I remember that all the comics blogs I was reading all appeared to become incredibly excited about the release of a new Scott Pilgrim volume. Being a finger-on-the-pulse kind of guy, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was suitably impressed that soon after I bought the first volume off Amazon. An obsession was born that saw me purchase the other 2 volumes and O’Malley’s first work, Lost at Sea.

Fast forward a year after that fateful summer, and we’re finally seeing the release of Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, or, if you like, Scott Pilgrim: Volume 4. This time maybe my blogging will be the reason someone else goes and picks it up.

Volume 4 sees all of the characters in Scott Pilgrim really come into their own – not to deny the quality of the first three instalments, but for the first time, it feels like the characters are driving the story rather than vice versa. The world of Scott Pilgrim is now well-established and it’s good to see that despite being in the somewhat unremarkable point in the process (volume 4 of 6) O’Malley hasn’t lost any of his momentum, and on the contrary, may well be as good as he’s ever been. Even the character models, which are notoriously fluid in earlier volumes, stay together nicely. In a stroke of utter, utter genius, the volume includes a manga-style full-colour section as the opening pages before switching back to monochrome. It’s a cruel tease, because as good as it looks now, I find myself staring at the colour pages and wishing it could all look that stunning.

The plot largely deals with Scott’s attempts to (unsurprisingly) get it together – find himself a job, and a place to live, and to try and sort out his relationship with Ramona. It also contains a few excellent twists, at least one of which I feel incredibly proud to have figured out from the hints dropped in the past. The romance is there, the tragedy is there, and the laugh-out-loud moments are there. Scott Pilgrim has dialogue that Joss Whedon would probably kill to have written.

In short, there’s absolutely nothing bad I can say about Scott Pilgrim. It speaks to me in a way that absolutely no other book on the shelves today can, and not just because it’s about people my age who share my interests – it’s because O’Malley manages to define exactly the sort of hopes, fears, successes and failures that people of our generation encounter, and he brings them to life using the language that we understand. Scott Pilgrim is my heroin, and Bryan Lee O’Malley is my dealer. Now I have to hope I can survive the long wait for that next fix. Suddenly, I realise what all those little Harry Potter-loving children (and adult-children) were going through at the end of every book, but know this: however painful the wait, IT’S ALL WORTH IT.e rotic 1996 the power of sex