Bryan Lee O’Malley is the brilliance behind Scott Pilgrim and I was beginning to lose hope that his pen may meet paper again. The final Scott Pilgrim book came out in 2010. 2010! The 2014 graphic novel Seconds was worth the wait. Like Scott Pilgrim, O’Malley takes a universal problem and adds his own twists. Scott wants the girl of his dreams, Katie wants to open her own restaurant but some bad decisions have prevented her from doing so. Then she discovers a method of changing the past, writing her mistakes in a notebook, eating the questionable mushrooms she found in her basement, and falling asleep. This book made me very happy. The colours are pretty and the characters are witty. O’Malley can portray intricate and complex moment in a single frame, in a single carefully crafted expression. It has the same charm as the Scott Pilgrim novels; laugh out loud moments while our heroes refuse to see their part in their own down fall. Katie is turning 30 and despite her ambition, she’s not quite where she wants to be. A panic, I’m sure, many can identify with. O’Malley’s stories are almost like fables. The ability and the magic is within ourselves; but sometimes, we need smoke, mirrors and graphic novels to realise that.

Katie is the head chef behind Seconds, the best restaurant in town, but she’s already looking towards new pastures and new challenges. All of her friends have moved away, and she’d like to run her own restaurant, rather than work in somebody else’s kitchen. She’s found the perfect place across the river, but the building work is taking far too long and seems to be tied up in a bureaucratic limbo. She also has the ghost of her previous relationship hanging over her head in the form of ex-boyfriend Max, and to top it off, there might be an actual spirit living in her room. But when an accident goes wrong in the kitchen, Katie discovers a small Lewis Carroll-esque mushroom with a note attached promising to fix everything. Eating the mushroom allows her to revisit the past and choose a different course of events, and soon she is trying to change things further and further back in time. The outcome is what she wished for, but she can’t always remember the steps she took to get there. But that’s nothing to worry about, is it? Eat, dream, repeat. Soon, things are spinning out of control, as things she supposedly agreed to/did/said catch up with her, and something in the walk-in freezer has started to grow… Seconds is quite a departure for O’Malley. Although it retains its hipster card, the video game aesthetic that so permeated Scott Pilgrim has been wiped away. Fans of O’Malley’s previous work will not be disappointed however – this is a totally charming story, filled with a similar brand of humour and a morality tale about acceptance that will strike a chord. Katie is sweet and believable, a charming mess with a propensity for breaking the fourth wall and arguing with the narrator. Nothing like the slacker Scott Pilgrim, she’s a hard-working and ambitious person, and it’s this desire for perfection that causes her to unravel. The other characters, such as the shy Hazel and the slightly obnoxious Max are well drawn, and have their own stories to tell. The artwork is gorgeous to look at, with bold character design and luscious backgrounds dripping with detail. Full-page panoramic drawings of the city practically leap off the page, and the same level of detail extends to the colouring. O’Malley has really upped the ante here – this is a crisper and more refined piece of work, even as the characters have reached almost chibi levels of short cuteness. As the mood of the novel darkens, we are treated to the occasional apocalyptic vision, and the slightly psychedelic otherworld outside of time and space. While the trajectory the novel takes might be predicted, there are enough ingredients in the mix to pull you through the pages, and Katie’s slow realisation is poignant – particularly in the context of her and Hazel’s burgeoning friendship. I enjoyed my time spent with Seconds, and if I could, I would gladly eat a mushroom in order to experience it again for the first time.

Ten years after the debut of the first book in his phenomenally successful Scott Pilgrim series, Bryan Lee O’Malley has written the equally wonderful Seconds, a story of love, loss and damn good food. Katie is feeling pretty stressed. Sure, she’s the head chef at the most popular restaurant in town (the eponymous Seconds) and she’s got big plans to open her own restaurant, but things are just not working out. The building she’s always dreamed of running a restaurant in is still a dump, her builder is demanding more money, her financier is AWOL, her current co-workers (including the one she’s having a secret fling with) are getting fed up with her, a waitress has been badly burned in a kitchen accident and, even worse, her ex-boyfriend Max is back in town and he wants to talk. So Katie has plenty on her mind when, in the middle of the night, she encounters the mysterious and somewhat menacing Lis and is given a notebook and a card with some simple instructions for resetting her life. In order to improve her situation, all Katie must do is: 1. Write your mistake. 2. Ingest one mushroom. 3. Go to sleep. 4. Wake anew. Never one to ignore a perfectly good mushroom, Katie follows the instructions and awakes the next morning to discover that all of the bad stuff that was bothering her had never happened. Life would be sweet if she was able to resist magical mushroom temptation and not try to keep making changes until her life (and those in it) was absolutely perfect... Seconds is the story of Katie’s (somewhat early) midlife crisis. She’s about to turn thirty and is both sacred and excited about what the future holds. At the same time, she fears giving up her youth and taking on the adult responsibilities involved in running her own restaurant. She’s also extremely conflicted in the romance department; her fling with Andrew allows Katie to feel young and free, while encountering Max again forces her to confront the future that she expected to have. Katie isn’t the easiest character to like; she’s pretty selfish in her single-minded pursuit of the dream restaurant and doesn’t seem to bother too much with the “little people” unless she needs their input on her own life. Saying that, she’s still a very compelling character to follow as she certainly takes no prisoners when it comes to getting things (and people) just the way she likes. After her initial mushroom-fuelled antics, she makes plenty of mistakes and encounters some serious heartbreak on her way to understanding exactly what she wants (and needs) from life. Seconds is very much Katie’s story and so the side characters don’t always get as much development as they deserve. It would have been nice to see more from Hazel and Andrew, and to learn Lis’s true nature and background. The art in Seconds is truly sublime. The characters would certainly feel at home in the Scott Pilgrim universe but Bryan Lee O’Malley’s style has definitely matured to be more polished and crisp yet still just as cute and cartoony. Every panel is refined and matches perfectly with the dialogue/action that is taking place. Unlike the original Scott Pilgrim books, Seconds is vibrantly coloured throughout, which really helps O’Malley’s characters and backgrounds to shine. O’Malley has masterfully weaved folklore and magic into contemporary reality in order to portray Katie’s life (lives?) as a fantastical yet believable story of growing up and moving on. Seconds is a delightful, funny and tender-hearted tale about the danger of wishing your life away and the joy of being exactly where you need to be. And yes, bread still makes you fat.