Scott Pilgrim

Scott Pilgrim — The Complete Comic King Guide

Scott Pilgrim is six black-and-white graphic novels about a slacker in Toronto who has to defeat his girlfriend’s seven evil exes, published between 2004 and 2010, and it is one of the defining comics of its decade. It became a film, a video game and a Netflix series. It has an Eisner, two Harveys and a pile of Canadian awards. And on 11 November 2026 there is a brand new one-shot — the first new Scott Pilgrim comic in sixteen years.

One structural fact shapes everything else on this page: there are no Scott Pilgrim single issues. No number one, no floppies, no back-issue run. It will never turn up in a long box because it was never in one. Ask which format, never which issue.

And one honest fact, which is the most interesting thing about this franchise commercially: the books are not worth much, and the reason why is genuinely surprising.

That is not a warning, by the way. Scott Pilgrim is one of the easiest recommendations we make and one of the few books here we will hand to a teenager without a second thought. It is just that what people believe about collecting it and what is actually true have drifted a long way apart, and this page exists partly to close that gap.

Quick Facts

Story: Scott is a twenty-three-year-old slacker in Toronto who has to defeat his new girlfriend’s seven evil exes. Video-game logic applied to a relationship comedy, and nothing looked like it in 2004.
Length: Six volumes, August 2004 to July 2010. One complete story with a real ending.
Status: ★ A brand new one-shot, Scott Pilgrim EX: Dawn of Metal Scott, arrives 11 November 2026 — O’Malley’s first new Scott Pilgrim comic in sixteen years.
Publisher: Oni Press, from the beginning. ⚠ Note for ordering: Oni moved to Penguin Random House distribution on 1 August 2026.
Age guide:Teen and up, and this is the rare positive note in an independent section otherwise full of adult horror. Some swearing and sexual references, nothing graphic. You can hand this to a fifteen-year-old.
Formats: Original black-and-white digests · colour hardcovers · larger colour paperbacks · anniversary box sets · and two actual comics, which are the only collectible items here.
At Comic King: Shelved where the graphic novels meet the manga, because that is where its readers already are — in both formats, always in stock.

The Most Famous Book Here Is Worth Less Than the One Nobody Read

In 2003 Bryan Lee O’Malley published his first book with Oni Press. It was called Lost at Sea, it is a quiet hundred-and-fifty-page story about a teenage girl who thinks a cat has stolen her soul, and hardly anyone bought it. A year later the same publisher put out Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. O’Malley has said he expected it to sell about a thousand copies.

Twenty-two years on, a copy of Lost at Sea in its original 2003 edition typically asks something in the region of ten times what a copy of Scott Pilgrim volume one asks. The obscure book beat the famous one, comprehensively.

The mechanism is worth understanding because it explains a lot of comics pricing generally. When Scott Pilgrim became a hit, Oni reprinted volume one over and over — and every printing kept the same cover, the same barcode and the same ISBN as the 2004 original. So the market for that book is now flooded with copies that are indistinguishable from the outside, and the price settles at whatever the most marginal copy will go for, which is thrift-store money. Lost at Sea went the other way: it was reprinted once, in 2010, with a new cover under a different number. The original stayed rare and, crucially, stayed recognisable.

Fame drove the reprints. The reprints destroyed the scarcity.

Now, you will read online that the thing to do is find a first printing of volume one, and that you identify it by reading the number line on the copyright page. We looked into that properly and we are not going to tell you it works, because we could not establish that it does.

Here is what we actually found. No price guide tracks Scott Pilgrim volume one at all — not by printing, not even as a single entry. Neither of the major grading companies has ever certified a single copy of any of the six volumes; as far as they are concerned these books do not exist as collectibles. The rare-book trade, whose entire job is labelling first editions, does not label this one: of thirty listings we looked at for the original edition, not one stated a printing, and the site’s own first-edition filter returned results that were demonstrably wrong, including a bulk seller advertising eight copies of a first printing simultaneously. On the auction sites, one listing described the same book as a thirty-second printing and a first edition in the same breath, asking eight dollars. And the one carefully-labelled first-printing set we could find, offered as all six volumes, did not sell.

So the honest position is this. A genuine 2004 first printing may well be scarce — it probably is. But no source records a premium for it, no transaction we could reach demonstrates one, and there is no published method of proving which printing you are holding. If you find one and you can prove it, wonderful. We are not going to charge you extra for a claim we cannot verify, and we would be wary of anyone who does.

There is a real tell in the run, though, and it is on a different book: the first printing of volume five has a shiny cover, and later printings do not. That one you can see across a table.

None of which is a reason not to buy it. It just means you are buying it to read, which is what it was made for, and it is superb. Scott Pilgrim is funny in a way very few comics manage — it has the timing of a good sitcom and the visual grammar of a fighting game, and it takes a genuinely serious idea seriously, which is that your partner’s past is not an obstacle course you clear. Scott is not a hero. He is a bit of a jerk, he has treated people badly, and the six volumes are largely about him working that out. That is why it has lasted while most of the comics around it in 2004 have not.

One more thing, and it is the reason we shelve it where we do. Scott Pilgrim is digest-sized, black and white, and paced like manga, because O’Malley was reading manga when he made it. If you read manga and have never bought a Western comic, this is the one that works — it looks familiar, it reads at the same speed, and it is set in Toronto rather than Tokyo. We keep it where those two sections meet on purpose.

The Run, Era by Era

Six volumes, one continuous story, and two actual comics off to the side that most people never notice.

The Keys — Issues Everyone Hunts

This is the shortest keys section on the site, and it is short for an interesting reason: the two Scott Pilgrim items that are genuinely collectible are the two that are not graphic novels.

Free Scott Pilgrim, from Free Comic Book Day in May 2006. Thirty-two pages, containing a seventeen-page original story set between volumes three and four in which Scott, Ramona and Wallace try to use some free cinema tickets and are attacked by clones. It was given away, so nobody treated it as valuable, and comparatively few survive in good condition. It is the scarcest Scott Pilgrim item there is and by some distance the most desirable. If you have a box of old Free Comic Book Day giveaways in a cupboard, it is worth looking.

Scott Pilgrim: Full Colour Odds & Ends, from 2008. The Free Comic Book Day story recoloured, a Kim Pine short, a strip that ran in a Toronto listings magazine, and a pile of pin-ups. Also a proper comic, also scarce, and also routinely mistaken for a modern collection.

Between them these two books are the entire graded population of Scott Pilgrim. Every certified copy in existence is one or the other, and there are fewer than fifty of them altogether after twenty years.

Volume one first printings are covered above. Worth checking for, not worth paying a premium for without proof.

Volumes two to six first printings are worth pulling out if you spot them, and volume five is the one with the visible tell. None of them approach the two comics.

And a warning about a claim that circulates on auction sites. You will see the 2005 anthology Comics Festival described as the first Scott Pilgrim appearance. It is not — it contains a one-page strip that came out nine months after volume one. There is no documented Scott Pilgrim appearance anywhere before August 2004, including in Lost at Sea, where he does not appear at all.

One thing this franchise does offer that most do not: it is genuinely completable, cheaply, in an afternoon. Six volumes, all in print, all inexpensive. If someone wants the satisfaction of finishing a run without a hunt or a budget, this is close to the best recommendation in the shop — and there is a natural upgrade path afterwards, because a lot of people who read the black-and-white set end up buying the colour one as well.

The colour hardcovers, the larger paperbacks and the anniversary box sets are all in print or recently so. They are excellent reading editions and they carry no collector premium whatsoever.

Every Format You Can Buy

Screen & Series Status

Updated August 2026: the live event here is a comic, and it has a date.

Scott Pilgrim EX: Dawn of Metal Scott arrives on 11 November 2026 — a twenty-four-page full-colour one-shot at a normal comic price, written and drawn by Bryan Lee O’Malley with colours by Nathan Fairbairn. It is a prequel to the video game of the same name, which came out in March 2026, and it introduces a robot doppelgänger called Metal Scott. Scott and Ramona are together and the exes have moved on with their lives. There is a sixteen-page introduction to Metal Scott inside it plus previously unseen extras and a look at how O’Malley works. Our favourite detail: he has said he was simply asked to make a minicomic for the game, and only afterwards realised it would be his first new Scott Pilgrim comic in sixteen years. It is explicitly a one-shot. We are taking pre-orders.

On screen, everything is finished, and that is a feature rather than a problem. The 2010 film underperformed in cinemas and then became one of the genuine cult successes of its era on home video — new viewers still find it constantly, and every one of them who likes it is a reader for volume one. The Netflix series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, arrived in November 2023 with the original film cast returning to voice their roles thirteen years on. It won a Critics Choice Award for best animated series, and it was cancelled after one season in November 2024. That is settled, not pending.

Which brings up the question that comes up most at the counter: which one is the real version? All three are different on purpose. The books are the original and the complete story. The film compresses six volumes into two hours and has its own ending — and the reason it has its own ending is a good story in itself, because the last volume had not been published when they shot the film. They filmed one ending, volume six came out three weeks before release with a different one, and they went back and reshot to match the book. The Netflix series is a deliberate swerve; it takes the same setup somewhere else entirely rather than retelling it. Nobody is wrong about which counts.

And there is a game, which is worth knowing about because it is the reason the new comic exists. Scott Pilgrim EX came out in March 2026 — a side-scrolling beat-em-up from Tribute Games with seven playable characters, an original story by O’Malley, and a soundtrack by Anamanaguchi, who also scored the 2010 game. It picks up after the Netflix series ends. If you played that and want the comic that leads into it, November is your date.

Collector's Corner — Grading, Care & We Buy

Three things, and the first one is where the money actually is.

Check the Free Comic Book Day boxes. Free Scott Pilgrim was a giveaway, so it turns up in exactly the places giveaways turn up — in with other Free Comic Book Day leftovers, in convention material, at the bottom of boxes people are not thinking about. It is the only Scott Pilgrim item that is scarce, gradeable and genuinely sought-after, and it costs nothing when it surfaces because whoever is holding it does not know. That is the single most valuable habit on this franchise.

Second, on the graphic novels themselves, we will be straight with you. These are reading copies, not collectibles. Digest paperbacks carried around in bags by students, so spine roll and cover wear are the norm rather than the exception. There is no price guide for them, no grading census, and no reliable way to prove a printing. We buy them, we sell them, and we price them as the excellent reading editions they are.

Third, and this one may save you real money: the anniversary box sets are currently selling on the secondary market well below what they cost new. They are beautiful objects and they make superb gifts, and we will happily order one for anyone who wants it. But if you are buying one because you think it will appreciate, please do not. The same is true of the individual colour hardcovers, which resell below their cover price.

A word on what to do if you think you have a first printing of volume one. Bring it in and we will look at it together, genuinely with interest — we would like to see one properly documented. What we will not do is quote you a premium on the strength of a claim neither of us can prove, and we would gently suggest treating anyone who does with some caution. The claim gets made confidently online by people who have not checked.

When collections come in, one specific note. Scott Pilgrim arrives with manga collections far more often than with comic collections, because that is where its owners shelve it — same size, same black-and-white interiors, same corner of the bookcase. If you are selling us a manga library, it is worth checking whether Scott Pilgrim is sitting in it. It is the same thinking as checking children’s boxes for the Batman comics that turn out to matter.