When a movie is called 'searingly honest,' it's almost invariably grim and demonstrates how bad things can get.
My coming of age was in the '70s. A lot of people look back on it as a grim decade, but I look back on it as a liberating time.
I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.
When I was in the middle of the 'Scott Pilgrim' series, and it was slowly becoming more popular, though still not financially solvent, I had this real bratty instinct to turn around and do something super arty and dark. I felt dismissed by comics culture, stuck in between the artcomix world and the nerdcomix world, and I was cranky about it.
There were times over the years when I wanted to take a break from 'Scott Pilgrim,' or even just stop doing 'Scott Pilgrim,' when I was feeling down or whatever.
I didn't expect 'Scott Pilgrim' to be successful. I just made this weird comic to entertain my friends.
The pilgrims on the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. To my knowledge, they didn't wait around for a return trip to Europe. You settle some place with a purpose. If you don't want to do that, stay home. You avoid an awful lot of risks by not venturing outward.
The purpose of going to Mars is for humans to first begin to occupy, permanently, another planet in the solar system. The astronauts or pilgrims, whatever you might call them, are going to be very historically unique human beings.
In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.
We don't live in a particularly attractive world. I don't really remember, except as a small boy, anything but a pretty grim world.
