How 'Scott Pilgrim' went from comic book to movie

Hollywood's obsession with comic books led to media giant Walt Disney Co.'s $4.3-billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment and Warner Bros.' decision to revamp its DC Entertainment unit.

But it's also transforming even the smallest comic book players.

Oni Press of Portland, Ore., which has nine employees and publishes three to five comics or trade paperbacks each month, is behind a big movie being released Friday by Universal Pictures: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World."

The special-effects-heavy comedy starring Michael Cera as a slacker who must battle his new girlfriend's seven evil exes is extremely loyal to writer-artist Bryan Lee O'Malley's comics, including borrowing their hyper-stylized, video-game-inspired visuals.

It's the first film produced by Closed on Mondays Entertainment, the production company that Oni Press publisher Joe Nozemack founded with producer Eric Gitter in 2003 to help shepherd Oni's projects onto the big screen. Closed on Mondays has 12 projects in various stages of development at studios and recently signed a deal with CBS to create television shows. The fact that such a small publisher has its own production company shows just how important Hollywood has become to the comic business, which has seen sales shrink recently at the same time that movies based on its material have exploded. We spoke to Nozemack about what it takes to survive and compete as an undersized comic book publisher in the current market and how "Scott Pilgrim," on which he served as co-producer, made it to the silver screen.

Q. Independent comic book publishers seem to be almost as common these days as independent film studios once were. How do you think Oni stands out?

A. Oni is really the sensibility of the people who work here, which is not as genre-based as a lot of other comic book publishers. It's harder to get superhero stuff through here because there's already so much of that in the industry. The majority of what we do is creator owned because the top talent are just not willing to sign the deals anymore where they give over everything to a corporation.

Q. You just released the sixth and final "Scott Pilgrim" book, which is obviously fortuitous timing. But isn't it unusual to set up a movie when you've only released a single book?

A. It depends. "Scott Pilgrim" would have been hard to explain without the first book. But some stuff you can sell based just on a pitch or a one-page description.

We might show people at a studio pages or sketches or treatments or outlines -- whatever we need to communicate the world and the story.

Q. Being a comic book publisher now seems to require being very savvy about the movie business. Did you ever expect that would become a key part of your job?

A. It certainly wasn't a goal. I love movies, but I don't think I could have gotten into the movie industry if I had just decided I wanted to develop scripts and get into the industry like I did with publishing graphic novels and comics. It ended up that I was in the right place at the right time.

The good news is that all of entertainment is really changing. People are able to pick things that speak to them much more individually, which means you have to be focused on a smaller audience. That's what we have been doing for decades.