Scott Pilgrim Creator Bryan Lee O’Malley Skewers Fashion and Phlegm in New Comedy Comic, Snotgirl
The Image Series will feature art from Leslie Hung
Cover Art by Leslie Hung
Throughout his decade-plus career, Bryan Lee O’Malley has proven himself an anthropologist as much as a cartoonist. The creator behind Scott Pilgrim has lined his comics with a cultural wit that borders on genius. O’Malley dissected millennial ennui in all six volumes of the Pilgrim saga, mixing a cacophony of indie-rock elitism, thrift-store ingenuity and all manner of highlighted hair throughout its pages. That pop culture obsessiveness tackled the foodie world in 2014’s Seconds, and this week O’Malley shifts his target to the fashion-blogging world in Snotgirl, his new Image title illustrated by Leslie Hung.
The titular Snotgirl is Lottie Person, a 25-year-old fashionista who attracts thousands of unique viewers to her blog where she doles out advice on maxi-dresses. Lottie also hides a harrowing secret: allergies force a constant stream of mucous and water from her face at any given time. In addition to her body rejecting pollen and dander, she also finds her obnoxious circle of friends and superficial lifestyle slowly repelling away. And then…things take a turn for the dark in a massive cliffhanger.
With its first issue hitting comic stores on Wednesday, Paste emailed with O’Malley to discuss allergies, “hotness” and empathizing with horrible characters.
Paste: This is the third project in which you’ve written about a 20-something undergoing something of a quarter-life crisis. What draws you back to characters in that phase of life?
Bryan Lee O’Malley: Fashion blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon; the earliest fashion-blogging pioneers are probably just in their early 30s. Most are in their teens and early 20s. So for this, it’s the subject matter that drew me back. Fortunately, I’ve been a 20-something, and my co-creator, Leslie Hung, is 27, so she’s got firsthand experience.
Paste: The backmatter of the first issue reveals that you’ve had personal trials with allergies. Was this the first step for the project? If not, what was its inception?
O’Malley: One day we started tossing character ideas around, and one of us said fashion blogger and the other said allergies. Leslie nicknamed her Snotgirl and it stuck. We both have terrible allergies and we both find fashion bloggers fascinating. It’s not a high-concept story, it’s very character-driven, so we spent a long time figuring out our main character and the kind of themes we wanted to explore, but we had the broad strokes on day one.
Snotgirl #1 Interior Art by Leslie Hung
Paste: Your characters who have focused on fashion and style (Scott Pilgrim villains Envy Adams, Lucas Lee) tended to be jerks who use clothing aesthetic to compensate for insecurities. In this first issue, Lottie seems to take a similar path. Has your view toward the field changed at all? On a scale from jeans-and-t-shirt fashion agnostic to fashionista, where would you rank yourself?
