Bryan Lee O’malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim recently spoke about the influence of shonen manga (boy’s manga) on the Scott Pilgrim comic series. Scott Pilgrim who is 23 years old, lives in the big city with his gay roommate. He’s in a band, he’s lazy and he likes video games. He likes the new girl in town, Ramona Flowers, but to win her heart, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends.

“I guess the concept of fighting the ex-boyfriends, and the structure of this story, one of the things that inspired this was the book, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga (by Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma). Me and Chris (Butcher, manager of The Beguiling), we both LOVED that book. I was just getting started as a cartoonist. I read the chapter about shonen manga in that book, and thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ It wasn’t like I had read a whole lot of shonen manga before then. (Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga) described the structure of shonen manga plots kind of like it’s a shish-kebab, where there’s meatball, meatball, meatball on a stick, with each meatball representing a fight; that’s how it explained what shonen manga really is. (laughs) So that just kind of stuck in my head. ”

Bryan Lee O’malley knew he wanted to structure this story like a video game. The other thing was his girlfriend, told him that she dated three guys named Matt — not at the same time, but at certain points in her life. He always thought that was kind of hilarious, so he thought it would be fun to draw a story about exes. Somehow, the ‘evil’ part came into play. He expressed that he was always more into anime than manga, but spent many days drawing in the style of Sailor Moon, even though he believed he didn’t necessarily have to draw in a perfect, flawless, technical style

For those who have seen the film, what did you think of the film? Does it live up to the Shonen genre?

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is currently in theaters now.