If you come looking for seconds on Scott Pilgrim, you won’t find them.  With that being said, though, Seconds is anything but disappointing.

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s new graphic novel features Katie, a woman nearing thirty years of age who leaves her partnership at a restaurant called “Seconds” in order to open a new one.  However, this new restaurant needs a lot of remodeling before it can open, and Katie constantly second-guesses her decision.  Furthermore, her ex-boyfriend shows up at Seconds and she begins to question her decision to leave him as well.  Why is Katie still haunting her old restaurant, you ask?  She lives above it in a little apartment, so she thinks nothing of loitering about the business, chatting up customers, and telling the new chef how to do his job.

Katie begins to see a girl that doesn’t belong around the restaurant and hanging out atop an old dresser in her apartment.  When she checks out the dresser, she finds a batch of mushrooms far back in one of the drawers.  These mushrooms come with a set of instructions that, if followed correctly, will allow the one who ingested them a second chance at just about anything.

Consequently, during her new restaurant’s renovation, the workers find an old pot behind a wall.  Katie brings it home. This pot serves as a catalyst to a supernatural upheaval, one that grows worse with each “do-over” Katie strives to achieve.

While O’Malley’s art is the same, and while some of the jokes are purposefully familiar, this book is completely different than Scott Pilgrim in that Katie’s story is grounded in realty with heavy swatches of the supernatural.  Yet, as dark as it can be, Seconds still retains a hopeful tone, even as Katie suffers through angst and indecision.

O’Malley has captured well that sense of “what-if?” we all dwell upon in our twenties when we know every decision we make will impact the rest of our lives.  In the end, O’Malley, through Katie, provides astute insight in regards to those kinds of thoughts, and while we philosophically can appreciate his message, poor Katie actually has to learn it the hard way.

Seconds is funny, thoughtful, dark, and yet irrefutably optimistic.   O’Malley has created a well-constructed tale that is clearly the result of careful plotting.  It is similar enough to Scott Pilgrim to entertain that character’s fans, yet original enough to delight solely due to its own merits.