When it comes to getting comics career advice, you want to hear from someone who’s been there. Someone who has navigated challenges and found great success. Someone like Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, who recently joined the impressive list of comics industry professionals to share their well-earned expertise with Columbus College of Art & Design students.
O’Malley sat down with a small group of Comics & Narrative Practice students for a brown-bag lunch on the eve of his sold-out talk at CCAD as part of the annual Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival. Students heard directly from O’Malley about the ins and outs of a career in comics, including O’Malley’s experience having Scott Pilgrim (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary) adapted into a live-action movie, a video game, and, most recently, an anime-style Netflix series.
5 things we learned about comics legend—and Scott Pilgrim creator—Bryan Lee O’Malley
1. Who were Bryan Lee O’Malley’s early comics influences? (Hint: one was Cartoon Crossroads Columbus cofounder Jeff Smith)
O’Malley has been a comics creator since way back. “I definitely have comics from grade school that I was doing in my notebook in class—sometimes for assignments, sometimes not,” he says. As a kid, he loved classics like Calvin and Hobbes, Archie, and Transformers. “And then when I was starting my career, I was really influenced by Craig Thompson and Jeff Smith,” says O’Malley. Smith’s Bone “was like the biggest thing for me, just seeing someone do a longform comic like that and like, the brush inking and so on. Yeah, he was a very inspirational figure to me.”
2. What does Bryan Lee O’Malley think about comics fan art?
“It’s really kind of humbling and inspiring to see the fan work,” says O’Malley. He continues, “I guess since I did the Netflix show, it really blew up the amount of fan art I’ve been getting. When I go online, the way the algorithms work, like it just shoves Scott Pilgrim stuff at me because I write ‘Scott Pilgrim’ in my captions and stuff. So I see a lot of it, but I try not to look at it too much, because I really feel like it’s not for me. They don’t necessarily want the author to see what they’re doing, which is really fine. … It’s such a world of its own and I want it to blossom; I don’t want to stifle it in any way.”
3. What has it been like for Bryan Lee O’Malley to collaborate on Scott Pilgrim adaptations?
O’Malley says he thinks that he was originally drawn to creating comics because he could do so while working solo. “I’m probably a control freak,” he admits. But when it came to the 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, O’Mally understood “I had no control, I just had to trust whoever I put it in the hands of,” he says. “In this case, it was (co-writer, producer, and director) Edgar Wright. He was very into the books and he wanted to make the movie look just like the books, which is not even necessarily what I would have done if I was in his shoes. … And then later on, I had an experience doing this show for Netflix where I was the executive producer, which means, like, I got to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to every single thing. And I tried to say ‘yes’ to as much as I could, because I really want the artists to be able to express themselves.”
The Netflix adaptation Scott Pilgrim Takes Off marks the first time where O’Malley has been the “boss” on a project, he says. “There’s a large human element that I never had to deal with before. So it was all about, for me, being open and allowing those other people's creativity to influence the project as a whole. And I think it led to something really fun,” he says.
4. How does music impact Bryan Lee O’Malley’s creativity?
It’s little surprise that O’Malley says he’s “always been a music person.” Scott Pilgrim’s titular character plays in a band called “Sex Bob-Omb,” and the story is set against the backdrop of indie music culture in Toronto in the early 2000s. The Netflix series includes a cameo by musician Weird Al, who, O’Malley says, “is basically the reason I exist. Weird Al is, like, the first pop culture I remember as a kid, so it was amazing to work with him for even 15 minutes.”
The band Anamanaguchi created the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game in 2010. “We developed a working relationship and then we’ve been close friends ever since. So they worked on the (Netflix) anime and I’ve done lots of stuff with them so it’s really been fun to be kind of intertwined with those guys,” says O’Malley.
Behind the scenes, O’Malley likes to make a playlist featuring music that complements whatever project he’s working on. Listening to the playlists is “a really convenient way for me to … get in the headspace of whatever the project is,” he says. “So, with Scott Pilgrim, I put on a lot of Canadian indie rock and grungy stuff. And then when I’m working on Snotgirl, I put on, like, girly pop. And, you know, if I was working like a fantasy thing, I would probably put on, like, some epic orchestral music or something. It just really gets me in the headspace really fast. I love that.”
5. What is Bryan Lee O’Malley’s favorite part of creating comics?
“My favorite part of making comics is generally when they’re nearly done—the last 5% of the work. I love seeing it all come together,” says O’Malley. “But I do love all the exploration and all the character complexity that I get to develop over the pages of a longer comic.” On the other hand, O’Malley has a “love-hate relationship with inking,” he says. “It's very hard. It's easy to kind of like, fall off and get rusty, and it hurts. It's kind of like a sport. So you have to kind of keep in shape for that stuff.”
Student takeaways from their conversation with comics icon Bryan Lee O’Malley
While getting to connect directly with someone of O’Malley’s stature isn’t an everyday thing, CCAD Comics & Narrative Practice students—like their peers in program areas across the college—regularly have opportunities to meet with professionals working in their field. Tessa Luicart (Comics & Narrative Practice, 2025) enjoyed the Scott Pilgrim comics and movie and was excited to meet O’Malley in person. She says she learned a lot from the visit, mainly on O’Malley’s own process and “how everyone really does work wildly differently.”
Getting visits like this from professionals is really important to me, regardless of who specifically it is. It's always nice to hear from someone currently in the industry I’m wanting to go into, and it gives me hope for my own creative future,” says Tessa Luicart (Comics & Narrative Practice, 2025).
Ian Drescher (Comics & Narrative Practice, 2025), who also attended the lunch with O’Malley, says it was meaningful to hear more about O’Malley’s creative process, how he balances his big projects, and his advice for writing characters. “I learned that it's okay to start slow, and that it's okay to let your work speak for you,” he says. Those type of part-inspirational, part-practical takeaways are exactly why visits such as O’Malley’s are baked into the Comics curriculum.
One of the things that we emphasize in the Comics department is real-world applications of the skills that the students are learning. It's so important that they get the chance to talk to professionals like Bryan to understand the industry they want to go into.”
Laurenn McCubbin
Associate Professor and Chair, Comics & Narrative Practice
Of course, there’s something special for students to meet someone whose work is as essential to pop culture as O’Malley’s is. It's pretty great that they get to hang out and chat casually with one of their comics heroes, which helps the students see that at heart these professionals are just like them—people who love nerding out about art and pens and comics as well as bonding over about video games,” says Comics & Narrative Practice Associate Professor and Chair Laurenn McCubbin.
Indeed, echoing McCubbin, Luicart says that beyond the professional conversation, it was a bonus to talk pop-culture faves with O’Malley. “I got to talk about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Bryan Lee O’Malley and that's something I never thought I’d be able to say,” she says.
Perhaps surprisingly, Drescher says the biggest impact of this type of intimate conversation with comics stars like O’Malley “is finding out that they're just normal people.”
Professionals have the same issues that students have, and overcome the same challenges. It's awesome to get to meet and interact with not only the people you look up to, but people who do and have done the same things as you,” says Ian Drescher (Comics & Narrative Practice, 2025).
And the benefits go both ways. O’Malley says he enjoyed connecting with the Comics students. “I love meeting cartooning students,” he says. “I wish I had gotten to go to a school like this, I wish I’d gotten to go to do a program like this. It’s cool to see their ideas, and … I’m just really rooting for them.”
Did you know: The Bryan Lee O’Malley-CCAD connection goes back more than a decade
Fun fact: Columbus band Times New Viking, which was founded by CCAD alums Adam Elliott, Beth Murphy, and Jared Phillips (all Fine Arts, 2004), inspired the sounds of the band Sex Bob-Omb in the 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Listen to Times New Viking on Spotify.
Learn more about CCAD’s Comics & Narrative Practice program here, or apply here.
