It’s not too hard to picture pop culture as a massive, interwoven tapestry of media — movies and television shows and books and podcasts all borrowing ideas and themes from one another, trying to offer consumers something familiar enough to be appealing but original enough to be captivating.  And one of my absolute favorite things in pop culture is when the creative types unabashedly reference their favorite works, with in-jokes or overt name-drops.

Brian K. Vaughan, author of the incredible comic Y The Last Man, wears his comic book geekery on his sleeve.  Every issue of Y is utterly packed with cheerful jokes that won’t make much sense to readers whose knowledge of the medium doesn’t match Vaughan’s, but it’s cool nonetheless to see such a good writer pay homage to his own influences.

More recently, the seriously bizarre (but hardly serious) action game Bayonetta has fun dropping cheeky references to other video games.  Bayonetta’s wacko plot may be a bit too out there for me, but hearing one of its characters emulate the Resident Evil 4 merchant was amusing, and Bayonetta’s own “Henshin A Go-Go” a delight.

In most cases, that’s as far as pop culture goes to plumb the depths of its own history.  Surface-level window dressings can be a ton of fun, but how often do such references have a genuine impact on the heart of a story?  Pretty rarely — which is one of the reasons Scott Pilgrim is so awesome.

Bryan Lee O’Malley doesn’t just work in commentary on music, video games, anime.  I mean, he does all that, and he does it well.  But that’s barely touching on what makes Scott Pilgrim such an original, interesting work.  Scott Pilgrim is a surreal blend of the real world and a goofy, magic-imbued fantasy reality, where Ramona Flowers can use subspace to travel through people’s dreams, where vegans are imbued with psychic powers, and where Scott isn’t just a twenty-something loser — he’s a twenty-something loser who always wins his fights.

O’Malley’s art trends towards the cartoony end of the comic spectrum, which is perfect for the offbeat, experimental mash-up of styles and genres present in his work.  Every great comic creates a detailed world for its characters to exist in, and the way that world is realized appropriately mirrors the style of the narrative.  Cartoony, oversized expressions would seem just as out of place in a post-apocalyptic thriller as minutely detailed characters would look in a lighthearted comedy.  Which isn’t to say that Scott Pilgrim is never serious — but in the world of comics, cartoony, iconic characters are easier to latch onto, and the more stylized they are, the more likely we are to buy into the world around them.

Which is important, because the world of Scott Pilgrim is unlike any other.  As they become more and more advanced, video games have been gravitating towards emulating Hollywood to the best of their ability.  They’re trying to adopt the language of movies: the way cinematography works, how scenes are composed, how characters interact.  Comics, on the other hand, have a very distinct style of storytelling, a way of handling time that is very much their own.  But Scott Pilgrim doesn’t quite play by those rules; it incorporates the trappings of video games at a conceptual level.  In a comic, there’s a way you expect characters to interact with their world, and in video games, there’s a way you expect the elements in the interactive environment to work.  But by infusing aspects of video games into Scott Pilgrim, O’Malley has birthed a cool mix of mediums, in which the expected logic of comics doesn’t work the way we’re accustomed to.

When characters die, they don’t die like they would in a comic; they die like they would in a video game, leaving behind power-ups or 1-Ups (or bunnies, in one Sonic the Hedgehog inspired incident). Video game iconography often pops up to establish a scene with a minimum of wordy explanation.  Game-esque “stats” are applied to objects and characters, like Ramona’s bat (+1 against blondes!) and Scott’s leveling up.  Anyone who’s familiar with video games will take these things for granted in a game, but O’Malley uses them to tell a story in a way that games never have.  Narrative in video games often disregards the way we interact with them — RPGs will throw tons of stats and levels and weapons at you, but those things almost never have any bearing on how the story plays out.  But Scott Pilgrim tells its story through those tropes.  Pretty cool, huh?

There’s plenty more video game stuff packed into Scott Pilgrim in the form of references like Clash at Demonhead, and some moments that break the Fourth Wall, which seems only natural for such an offbeat comic.  As interesting as the Scott Pilgrim comic is, it’s even more tantalizing to anticipate how Edgar Wright will take the video game elements and incorporates them into the upcoming film adaptation.  Odds are it won’t work in quite the same unique way, but who knows?