Seconds - Bryan Lee O'Malley (SelfMadeHero)
Forever destined to be introduced as a ‘much-anticipated follow up’, Seconds jettisons a lot of Scott Pilgrim's tics, including some of the playful ways it meddled with the comics form and gleeful breaking of the fourth wall.
But this is one of the places where those tendencies seep back in. Seconds is narrated in third-person, by captions which hang in the air above Katie’s head. And throughout, Katie directly addresses - and, in this case, contradics - the way her story is being narrated.
As the captions use free indirect speech - staying just outside of Katie’s head, but heavily dosed with her perspective - they read like a live commentary playing out in Katie’s head.
When she contradicts these monologues, then, Seconds softly establishes and then reminds you how indecisive she is as a character, which (without spoiling anything) turns out to be sort of the point of the book. But on the surface, it’s just a great running joke.
