I have a confession to make. Although I come off as all indier-than-thou when it comes to Scott Pilgrim, having spent the last year or so frequently uttering the phrase “What? You still haven’t read it yet?”, sneering at people attempting to pass critical comment on the books and film when they’d only discovered it recently, and generally acting like I have a god-given right to be considered a True And Proper Scott Pilgrim Fan, the truth can finally emerge.

I didn’t start reading Scott Pilgrim until after book four had come out.

I know. Shocking, isn’t it? What a loathsome hypocritical bastard I am.

I was faintly aware of the series beforehand, having been shown it by none other than James (Hunt, this time) when visiting his house. He was raving about the book, and I had a skim through it – it looked faintly amusing (I’m fairly sure at this point he would have pointed out the Monkey Island references in book two in an attempt to get me onside) but it was in a style/format that I wasn’t really all that enamoured with. “It’s just another of James’ manga-about-young-people,” I thought, having also never got round to reading his beloved Cromartie High School. It wasn’t until my birthday in 2007, when I was presented with copies of the first two books by James (wisely, he’d guessed that I’d like the first one enough to want to read the second immediately) that I actually got to read it. Mind you, I was pleased to receive the books, no question (I’d heard enough good things by this point), but I still wasn’t entirely sure it was going to be for me.

Those doubts began to dissipate the moment I sat down on the train back to Brighton (where I was living at the time) at Victoria, and cracked open Precious Little Life. I can pretty much pinpoint the scene that had me falling for the series – it’s the one at the party, with the twin moments of “Do you know this one girl with hair like this?” and “And then he stalked her until she left the party” hooking me in different ways. And my first proper laugh-out-loud (there would be many, many more over the next five books) came as a drunken Wallace flicked on the light with a huge grin on his face and slumped on to the bed. It was that wonderful fusion you only get in comics of something that’s funny as it’s written, and which actually looks funny in the way it’s drawn, and has perfect on-page comedic timing.

I was totally Bryan Lee O’Malley’s bitch forever from then on, of course. Actually getting to those Monkey Island references in context was just the icing on the cake (although actually, getting to go straight on to book two in general probably did help to cement an immediate love of the series – to this day, it’s possibly still my favourite book of the six), and naturally I had to get copies of books three and four ordered from Dave’s Comics in Brighton pretty much the next day (see, in those days, you couldn’t just get Scott Pilgrim next day from Amazon. You had to go direct market. Yeah, I’m still a bit hardcore) And the rest, as they say, is history – and how excited I was on the release day for book five, trekking to Gosh! at lunchtime to pick up my pre-ordered bookplate copy. I was a proper fan, by then.

I don’t particularly need to delve into my love of the series in any more detail, since I’ve already written far too much about it on this site – but suffice to say, it’s probably on balance my most beloved comic since Sandman. I’ve since repeated the act by giving the first books to a variety of friends and relatives on their birthdays – but all of that is a direct result of James’ innate faith in the fact that I was going to love this comic unconditionally. He was damned right.