We got a stereo, you just got to turn the knob and baby we'll go as far as we can... but we're not garbage men. This week, we have special guest, Matthew Tyler Di Leo (aka SonicMTD) to help talk us through the fandom of Scott Pilgrim... fans.
Next week, we have Jen Frankel, author of the Undead Redhead series to chat with us about fans of speculative fiction!
If you'd like to hear more from Matt or check out his work, you're in luck!
History and Origins:
Scott Pilgrim is a series of graphic stories by Bryan Lee O'Malley. The series is about Canadian Scott Pilgrim, a slacker and part-time musician who lives in Toronto, Ontario and plays bass guitar in a band. He falls in love with American delivery girl Ramona Flowers, but must defeat her seven evil exes in order to date her.
The series consists of six digest size black-and-white volumes, released between August 2004 and July 2010, by Portland-based independent comic book publisher Oni Press. It was later republished by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins. Full-colour hardback volumes, coloured by Nathan Fairbairn, were released from August 2012 to April 2014.
A film adaptation of the series titled Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starring actor Michael Cera in the title role was released in August 2010. A video game adaptation developed by Ubisoft for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade was released the same month.
Search Data:
As far as Google trends data goes, Scott Pilgrim looks like a flash in the pan, and the movie is a lot more popular than the graphic novel series. There is a huge spike in interest (on either graph) around August 2010, then a long tail into the present.
By country, for the graphic novel series, the top ten countries for search volume are: Iceland (by a large margin), Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico, United States, Philippines, South Korea, Paraguay, Australia.
By country, for the movie, the top ten countries for search volume are: Mexico, Chile, Canada, Puerto Rico, United States, Russia, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom.
Size of Fandom:
Based on a few data points...
... so it's probably fair to say that there are _tens of thousands of fans_.
Fan Demographics:
Looking at the ratings from IMDB, we can get an extremely loose sense of the demographics (for the movie at least):
Fast Facts: