Recently we announced that we’ll be co-presenting a screening of Scott Pilgrim vs The World along with Graphic Content at The Metro Cinema at the Garneau Cinema. Every month, Graphic Content curates a book list that thematically ties into and builds on the chosen film – and this month, we’ve been graciously invited to choose a couple of books ourselves with the Graphic Content curators.  The next item on the book list was selected by Erin Fraser: 

HOPELESS SAVAGES: GREATEST HITS 2000-2010 (Oni Press)
Story by Jen Van Meter, Pictures by many, including but not limited to Christine Norrie, Bryan Lee O’Malley,
Chynna Clugston Flores and Ross Campbell

High school student Skank Zero Hopeless-Savage wants to a punk musician like her famous parents, 70s punk rockers Dirk Hopeless and Nikki Savage, but they want her to learn something useful and go to film school. She wakes up one morning, to find her house ravaged, her parents missing, and the message “Don’t call the police,” scrawled across the wall. Quickly she calls her older sister and brother, Arsenal Fierce Hopeless-Savage and Twitch Strummer Hopeless-Savage, over to assess the situation. In order to save their mum and dad, they first need to track down their estranged brother, Rat Bastard Hopeless-Savage, and get the band back together.

Thus begins writer Jen Van Meter’s amusing and heartfelt Hopeless Savages. With a series of artists, including Bryan Lee O’Malley, she tells the adventurous and misadventures of Zero and her madcap family. Delving into tropes of the music scene and the alternative art world, Meter derives her from recognizable archetypes, but are wholly unique. The book collects three miniseries, which show the Hopeless-Savages coming together to overcome a variety of adversaries, and a collection of short stories and one shots, including a helpful glossary of Zero’s distinctive slang.

At its best, Scott Pilgrim thematizes and conceptualizes the place that romantic relationships take up in our lives and the forming of our identities. Well, Van Meter applies a similar strategy to the dynamic of families. The Hopeless-Savages are crazy and dysfunctional, but they are crazy and dysfunctional together. They need one another, not just to because they understand each other through the commonality of shared experiences, but also because they can’t be themselves without one another. On his own, Rat becomes David Sterling, a mocha jockey, just anotherupper-class “Joe Citizen”. In trying to run from and erase his past he loses his identity, but within the Hopeless Savages unit, he is a son and older brother, a counselor and a hero. Together they bring out the best in one another and the family as a whole. They can stand up to corrupt managers, reality show producers, conservative protestors, and Hong Kong gangsters. Every challenge they face brings them not only closer together, but closer to themselves. The series is instantly relatable and inspiring to anyone who belongs to a crazy family themselves, and don’t we all. Skank Zero and the rest of the Hopeless-Savages will also earn a way in to your heart with their resilience, dignity, and love.

If that weren’t enough, give Adam Warrock’s ode to the series a listen. I dare you not to sing along.