Scott Pilgrim makes progress

Nearly every episode of Netflix's excellent animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off begins with an elaborate hair-colour montage: the show's heroine Ramona Flowers squeezes bleach out of a tube, applies bright colours to her duotone hair, and wipes the fogged-up mirror clean.

- RAJA SEN

Each morning she emerges a different flavour. It's like Kate Winslet's Clementine from the 2004 masterpiece Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Prime Video) who used her green/red/orange/blue hair to signal the state of her heart.

That's the kind of thing I wouldn't put past Ramona-or maybe this is simply hi-vis colouring, so she can be spotted while rollerblading across an intra-dimensional highway. A highway inside an unsuspecting boy's brain.

Like that boy, I appear to have gotten ahead of myself. His name is Scott Pilgrim, and he first showed up in a graphic novel series that began in 2004.

Written and illustrated by Bryan Lee O'Malley, the books told the story of a clueless young bass-player who falls for this bright-haired girl, then realises that in order to be with her, he would have to fight her seven evil exes. The metaphor was straightforward and videogamey: these arguments turned into full-blown Dragonball Z-style battles, where vanquished players turned into coins for winning players to collect. The books are clever, sarcastic, surprisingly introspective, and even achingly romantic.

A 2010 adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (JioCinema), directed by Edgar Wright, faced the Game Of Thrones dilemma: the film ran out of novel.