Let me tell you about my neighbourhood.

It's in Toronto, it's called the Annex, and since Scott Pilgrim came along, it's been a much more interesting place. If you've read the books, you've probably seen lots of it already; Scott and Knives browsing records at Sonic Boom, the Clash at Demonhead playing at Lee's Palace. When Edgar Wright and his crew were filming the movie, the streets were covered in fake cotton snow for weeks, and the watchful few could have spotted Michael Cera from time to time. I got to be an extra in one of the movie scenes, and while I'm doubtful that it made the cut, I'm keeping my eyes peeled when Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comes out next month.

The Annex is an odd hybrid of rich-people houses and student-ghetto apartments. It's where the frathouses are within shouting distance of the yacht club. If you're young, and new to Toronto -- as I was, five years ago, fresh out of university -- it's the place you go to reinvent yourself, starting over again in the big city. Being new here, in your twenties and at the height of your powers, it can be easy to feel that life is like a game; you get to reinvent the rules of how you live, and the prize at the end is grown-up success. It was soon after I moved here that my friends first introduced me to Bryan Lee O'Malley's work, and I was immediately taken in by how relatable it was.

For Scott, life is literally a game, and everyone around him see the grown-up tasks ahead of them through the prism of childish Sega Genesis-era pop culture. Scott's is not so much a world where video games are real, as it is a world where they're the idiom everyone uses to understand reality, their feelings and their relationships. There are no adults in the Scott Pilgrim universe, except as occasional background characters; everyone who matters is under 30, and on roughly the same level of pop-cultural hipness. They're all playable characters in the game of life, and you're rooting for them all the way -- because you're a player too, or you want to be.

What's most interesting about Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour is what happens when that game-of-life metaphor starts to break down, and turns on Scott with a vengeance. We start off with a dejected Scott, abandoned by Ramona, dreaming of Gideon and wasting his time on a handheld video-game console. This is probably the best part of the book, because we're reaching the outer limits of Scott's video-game universe and seeing real-world despair on the other side. "Oh, dude, I finally beat this one guy ... video games ..." His world is crumbling around him, his friends are moving on with their lives, and he's starting to realize that his memories of relationships past -- which O'Malley has an inventive way of showing in this volume -- aren't quite accurate.

That's as much of the book as I want to spoil right now. Of course Scott bounces back; of course it builds up again to the climactic battle with Gideon; and as to whether he gets the girl or not, that's something that has to be seen to be believed. It's a satisfying conclusion that brings all the threads of the story back together, and it leaves you with some meaty emotional issues to chew on.

What's more, this volume is an artistic tour de force. O'Malley's layouts are light-years ahead of the previous volumes in terms of dynamic structure and creativity. It's stylistically consistent with the earlier books, but with the background and inking assistance of John Kantz and Aaron Ancheta it's a bolder and more polished-looking book than we've ever seen from the series.

Toronto used to be O'Malley's home, too. I read the books now and imagine how he must have lived and felt, probably blocks away from me and not so long ago, to have been inspired to write such a heartfelt story.

All I know is that, today, it's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.