Seconds

What do you do to follow up a phenomenon like “Scott Pilgrim?”

If you’re creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, then the answer is you take several years off to get your bearings and decide what your next move is.  Then you pour all of your energy into creating a 300+-page graphic novel about a chef/restaurant owner who is in the middle of getting beaten down by life and finds an out involving mushrooms and a house spirit.  After that, you release it into the wilds where there’s a chance that even people who didn’t get into “Scott Pilgrim” will give it a shot to see if they like it any better than your signature work.  Which is what happened to me.  So if you’re wondering about that last bit, the answer is a qualified, “Yes, I did.”

Katie is the talented top chef at Seconds, the most popular restaurant in town.  In fact, she’s successful enough to leave the place and start up her own joint at a new place in the city.  Problem is that refurbishing the new place is turning out to be a nightmare, and then on one particularly bad day she antagonizes her current fling, her charming ex-boyfriend shows up, and one of the waitresses at Seconds gets some nasty burns.  It’s a lot to take in, but that night she finds a box with a mushroom and instructions for how to use it in order to make her mistakes go away.  So Katie uses it, and the problems of that bad day are gone when she wakes up.  Though she’s told that this is a one-time deal there’s nothing stopping her from finding more mushrooms and using them to make her life perfect.

Let’s start things off by talking about the art.  O’Malley’s style has an acknowledged manga influence and it’s an absolute joy to take in over the course of the volume.  The distinctive look of his chibi characters stand out in comparison to most American comics — superhero, indie or otherwise — and there’s a vibrancy to how they show their emotions that draws you right in.  Though the character designs may be simple, they really do a great job of conveying their personality.  O’Malley even shows that he can bring lots of detail in the city scenes, and there are also plenty of inventive panel layouts to keep the look of the book visually interesting throughout.  Seeing the craziness of things like house spirits, skeleton staff members, and waitresses in garters also help in that respect as well.

Given that there is this super-deformed look to them, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that “Seconds” is primarily a comedy.  There’s certainly a likeable irreverence at work in the narrative, best seen whenever Katie starts arguing with the narrator, yet things don’t always stay bright and sunny.  The book goes to some serious, and even dark places by the end of the narrative.  Even though you might be caught off guard by “Seconds’” cheerful look, these changes are surprising and effective thanks to the development O’Malley gives to his main character.

I can imagine that some may not find Katie all that likeable due to her brash personality and the way she makes a hash of this great gift.  Yet, it’s that brashness that drives what we see of her success at the start of the story and as we see in her interactions with Hazel, she is capable of caring about someone other than herself.  There’s also the fact that her mindset it utterly necessary to survive what the book throws at her over the course of the narrative.  She suffers accordingly for her sins but still retains the guts to do what’s necessary to try and make things right at the end.  It may be a familiar arc, but the execution here is still quite solid.

The rest of the cast isn’t fleshed out as well.  Hazel is the exception as you’d think that someone as tall, with great hair, and very good-looking as her would have it made.  She doesn’t, as the girl is the shy and introverted type, more at home with drawing in her notebook and leaving food and clothes out for Seconds’ resident house spirit.  It seems unlikely that Hazel would ever become friends with Katie, but circumstances bond them together with welcome results.  Katie’s boyfriends (not at the same time, usually) Andrew and Max never really evolve beyond what we see of them in their introductions while Seconds’ owner Raymond is mainly there to provide deadpan comic relief to our protagonist’s antics.  Then there’s Lis, the house spirit, and aside from being one of the more stylishly rendered characters, her main purpose is to drive the plot.  As for the other characters… they’ve got dialogue and that’s about it.

However, the relative lack of development amongst the supporting cast isn’t the book’s biggest issue.  In fact, you may have already figured it based on my description of the story.  After all, it’s about someone who gains the ability to erase any mistake they made, and those things always wind up with the protagonist using this power responsibly to make life better for everyone around them.  AM I RIGHT?  Much to my regret, O’Malley doesn’t find a way to put a new twist on this familiar story and it never really became all that compelling for me.  I will admit that seeing reality decohere around Katie as things went on was interesting, but it’s the art and humor that carried my attention as the story went on.

You may know how “Seconds” will end as soon as Katie takes that first mushroom, yet it’s not a bad trip to take.  As I said, the humor and art sustained me through the most familiar parts of the story and the book also has plenty of style in its execution.  This won’t be the phenomenon that “Scott Pilgrim” was.  It should, however, serve to further cement O’Malley’s reputation as a skilled storyteller.  I won’t be waiting for his next work with bated breath, but I will pick it up when it comes out.