If he’d been in a club getting sweat on by Fugazi, he never would have spent all those nights listening to R.E.M. and reading William Gibson, which gave him the sense of pride that comes from finding something you love and keeping it to yourself.
You have to embrace Bleak House for what it is – a rambling, confusing, verbose, over-populated, vastly improbable story which substitutes caricatures for people and is full of puns. In other words, an 800-page Dickens novel.
In any other book, I would see these tactics as pandering to the baser instincts of the reading public. But in this book, in which Mikael is so obviously a stand-in for Stieg, it's just tacky. Especially since this Stieg/Mikael amalgamation has also appointed himself head of the Respecting Women Committee.
Even within this unruly genre, the Scott Pilgrim series is unique in its flexible relationship with convention, borrowing freely from anime, video games, movies, and pop culture.