Ghost World

AUTHOR: Clowes, Daniel

ARTIST: Daniel Clowes (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1993-1997

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1997

Publication History

Ghost World first appeared in Eightball, issue 11 (June, 1993), an alternative comic book published by Fantagraphics Books and written and drawn by Daniel Clowes. Eightball alternated continuing series, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, with single stories, such as “Ugly Girls,” in which a Clowes’s alter ego states his preference for brainy, bespectacled brunettes over blond bombshells. Ghost World ran for eight issues, ending in Eightball, issue 18 (March, 1997); each chapter was self-contained, yet they work together as a whole.

When Ghost World was published as a graphic novel in 1997, the chapters were named, and Clowes added some preliminary drawings hinting at a backstory: In one image, main characters Enid and Rebecca are shown in their graduation gowns, with Enid giving the finger to their old school; in another, the girls, looking twelve or thirteen, are shown visiting a grave. In 1998, Ghost World received Ignatz Awards for “outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning” in two categories: Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection (for the graphic novel) and Outstanding Story (for the original Eightball series). Ghost World has been reprinted numerous times, including a 2008 hardcover edition combining the original comic with the film screenplay, unused drawings, memorabilia, and an introduction by Clowes.

Plot

In interviews, Clowes has said that he began writing Ghost World with the idea of creating characters whose circumstances and experiences were far removed from his, yet who still shared some of his attitudes. While he originally felt that writing about teenage girls would prevent the story from becoming too autobiographical, Clowes said he was surprised at how much of himself ended up in Ghost World. Like his young heroines, he dislikes the slickness and manipulation of modern culture; values the odd, offbeat, and old; and still struggles to define his own identity.

The story opens on a random day in the life of Enid and Rebecca, teenage girls with spare time. They watch a bad comedian on television and delight in his awkwardness. Enid chides Rebecca for reading Sassy, a teen magazine, which she derides as fake and pseudo-hip. She describes an encounter with John Ellis, who has befriended a pedophiliac former priest. Enid also tells of meeting Bob Skeetes and a Satanist couple. While little happens in the first chapter, the reader gets a sense of the characters and their offbeat humor.

In the next episode, Enid has a garage sale but decides that her childhood treasures, like “Goofie Gus,” a statuette from fifth grade, are too precious to part with. She does sell an eggbeater to Skeetes, who invites her to call him for a psychic reading. She and Rebecca encounter Melorra, a former classmate whom the girls dislike, in a diner and the Satanists in the supermarket. At this point, the girls are so in synch with each other that Rebecca immediately recognizes the Satanist couple, even though she has never seen them.

Enid adopts a retro punk look but is disgusted when an old classmate, John Crowley (formerly known as “Johnny Apes”) misinterprets her style choice. Enid talks about wanting to find one perfect, vintage look, but her quest for the perfect style seems as elusive as her quest for the perfect man. She says she wants to meet a sophisticated man, like her favorite cartoonist, “David Clowes,” but she is horrified when she sees him in a magazine shop. (Clowes draws himself as a shabby, leering creep.) She and Rebecca discuss their sex lives, or lack thereof. Enid persuades Josh to take her to a sex shop, where she buys a bondage mask. She finds the seedy shop hilarious, but Josh is clearly embarrassed. She narrates this adventure to Rebecca and then reminisces about her first sexual experience. Rebecca is angry that Enid went to the sex shop without her.

As their aimless days continue, Rebecca and Enid visit Hubba Hubba, a fake 1950’s diner, and make fun of its inauthentic decor, menu, and waiter, whom Rebecca calls “Weird Al.” They amuse themselves by reading personal ads and later play a trick on a man who is trying to reconnect with a woman he once met. Enid calls him, pretending to be the woman, and arranges to meet him at Hubba Hubba. The girls persuade a disapproving Josh to drive back to the diner to see if the man described as a “bearded windbreaker” will show up. The prank succeeds, but it is less fun than they expected.

Enid and Rebecca discuss “Norman,” a man who sits and waits for a bus that was rerouted years ago. They see Melorra and some of her obnoxious show business friends in a diner, briefly torment Josh, and then wander around town, where they see the Satanist woman apparently on her own after a fight with her husband. Feeling forlorn, the girls clasp hands. Enid promises not to leave for college. Later, the girls look through old pictures, including one of the graffiti “Ghost World” Enid took years ago, and Enid becomes obsessed with finding a record from her childhood. They argue about Enid’s college plans. Enid, angry at Rebecca, tries to seduce Josh but leaves in tears when he confesses he really cares about her. When she returns home, she sees her father has left her a box of old records in her room. She falls asleep listening to the song “A Smile and a Ribbon.”

As the story concludes, Rebecca tries to accept that Enid may go away if she passes her college entrance exam. She and Enid discuss Enid’s encounter with Josh and if she should pursue a relationship with him. Enid jokes that when she gets tired of Josh, Rebecca can have him as a hand-me-down. Late that night, Rebecca knocks on Josh’s door. They have sex, but she still suspects that Josh likes Enid more. In an attempt to revisit a rare happy childhood memory, the girls go to “Cavetown, USA,” a cheesy tourist attraction. Rebecca talks about going with Enid when she leaves for college. She wants everything to be like it was in high school, while Enid wants to change everything, especially herself. Enid dreams of one day getting on a bus and going to some distant city, where she can create a new identity.

Enid fails her college exam. As autumn sets in, she has a final encounter with Rebecca, now working in a bagel shop; they are polite, but it is clear they are no longer close, and Rebecca seems to be hiding tears. In the final scene, Enid walks through town carrying a 1950’s-style round suitcase. She finally sees the graffiti artist painting “Ghost World.” She calls to him, but he runs away. As she walks by, Enid sees Rebecca and Josh through a restaurant window. She says a silent goodbye to her old friend, gets on the bus, and leaves.

Volumes

•Chapter 1, “Ghost World” (1993). This volume introduces Enid, Rebecca, and some of the eccentric characters they encounter, including John Ellis, Bob Skeetes, and the Satanists.

•Chapter 2, “Garage Sale” (1993). Enid has trouble letting go of childhood treasures; more encounters with Skeetes and the Satanists are featured.

•Chapter 3, “Punk Day” (1994). This covers the girls’ angst about clothes, boys, and sex; Enid has a disappointing glimpse of cartoonist “David Clowes.”

•Chapter 4, “The First Time” (1994). This includes the first appearance of Josh and Enid’s story about the loss of her virginity.

•Chapter 5, “Hubba Hubba” (1995). Enid and Rebecca play a phone prank; Josh disapproves.

•Chapter 6, “The Norman Square” (1995). As Enid considers college, the girls experience the beginnings of separation anxiety.

•Chapter 7, “A Smile and a Ribbon” (1995). The girls experience nostalgia for their childhood and a romantic triangle.

•Chapter 8, “October” (1997). In this long concluding chapter, friendship ends as Enid and Rebecca take their lives in different directions.

Characters

•Enid Coleslaw, the protagonist, is a smart and sarcastic eighteen-year-old girl with a black bob hairstyle, glasses, and a quirky sense of style. On impulse, she may dye her hair green and adopt a retro 1977 punk look or wear go-go boots or a leather bondage mask she finds in a sex shop. As the series begins, Enid has just graduated high school, lives with her father, and has no particular plans for the future. She and her friend Rebecca spend their time hanging around diners, making fun of the odd characters they see. She is critical of contemporary popular culture and of people she deems trendy and pretentious, but she has sympathy for those she considers true outsiders. While she appears knowing and self-assured, she has moments of self-doubt.

•Rebecca Doppelmeyer, Enid’s best friend, is a teenage girl with blond hair who shares Enid’s sarcastic sense of humor but is slightly more conventional in her style and outlook. She lives with her elderly grandmother. Although the more traditionally attractive of the two girls, Rebecca is quieter and less confident, allowing Enid to take the lead in their activities. Like Enid, she is interested in Josh, but she is sure he prefers Enid. When Enid flirts with the idea of attending college, Rebecca feels resentful that her friend has made this major life decision without her, and this creates a rift that ultimately ends their friendship.

•Josh is a friend and semi-serious love interest for both Enid and Rebecca. Tall, blond, and unassuming, he seems to be around the same age as the girls—he may be slightly older. He is more serious and mature than they are and has a car and his own apartment. While disapproving of the girls’ pranks and schemes, he is, as Enid says, easily manipulated into going along with them. Josh clearly has a crush on Enid, but he is also attracted to Rebecca.

•Bob Skeetes is an eccentric, middle-aged astrologer and psychic. His gaunt face and prominent teeth lead Enid, who keeps running into him at odd moments, to compare him to actor Don Knotts. Enid suspects Skeetes is a con man, but she finds him fascinating.

•John Ellis is an obnoxious, confrontational acquaintance of Enid, obsessed with serial killers, child molesters, and Nazis. Nerdy and unattractive, he seems to have a crush on Rebecca, who ignores him.

•Enid’s Father, whose first name is never revealed, apparently changed his last name from Cohn to Coleslaw. Ellis interrupts Enid when she is about to explain why he changed his name, but since Enid refers to her father’s political activism, it may have been a protest against right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn. Enid’s father is balding, slightly rotund, and well meaning but a little overwhelmed by his role as a single father.

•Melorra is a perky, overly earnest former classmate of Enid and Rebecca and a symbol of everything they hate. She works for Greenpeace but takes an acting role in a commercial for a right-wing political candidate.

Artistic Style

Ghost World is notable for its clean black-and-white lines and distinctive use of one accent color, pale blue. This melancholy, twilight shade gives the panels an appropriately “ghostly” feeling and mimics the look of a dark room lit by television (an image Clowes uses throughout the series). Clowes told an interviewer that he used Rubylith overlays to add the blue tones to Ghost World, a technique he learned in art school in the late 1970’s.

Clowes’s earlier work was often grotesque and hyperdetailed, showing the influence of underground comics legend Robert Crumb and MAD magazine artist Basil Wolverton, but with Ghost World, he moved toward a more simplified, stylized look, reminiscent of 1950’s commercial artwork or old newspaper cartoon strips. He also uses classic cinematic techniques to striking effect, alternating close-ups with medium and long shots and sometimes showing his characters through unusual perspectives, framed in a window or looked down on from far above. The almost wordless final page of Ghost World, for example, echoes the look, if not the mood, of film noir: a full view of Enid walking, the restaurant in the background; a closer view, over Enid’s shoulder, of two figures in the restaurant window; a close-up of Rebecca, seen through the window; Enid’s reaction, at medium distance; a bird’s-eye view of her walking down the street; Enid outlined in black against the open door of the bus; a long view of the empty street. As he does throughout the story, Clowes uses alternating panel sizes and perspective to frame the action and emphasize key moments. While Ghost World is known for its quirky characters and sharp, funny dialogue, scenes such as this one show that Clowes can tell a story using purely visual elements.

Themes

Coming of age, identity, friendship, and loss are major themes in Ghost World. Over the course of a single summer, Enid and Rebecca grow up, try to figure out who they are, and ultimately grow apart.

Initially, Enid and Rebecca, like the two teenage heroines of the film The World of Henry Orient (1964), to which Clowes refers in a drawing, live in an ordinary world made extraordinary through imaginative projection. Thus, the strange, sun-shunning couple glimpsed in a diner must be Satanists. Cheap and seedy places such as the Hubba Hubba diner and the sex shop are imbued with a mysterious glamour. Though some reviewers described Enid and Rebecca as “bored teenagers,” Clowes says he sees them as the opposite of bored, because they always have something they can get excited about. Yet as the summer ends and adult responsibilities draw nearer, that sense of excitement is being drained away by the banality of the real world.

Both Enid and Rebecca struggle to define their identities throughout the series. Rebecca is the less flamboyant of the two girls, more of a follower than a leader. Tall, thin, and blond, she would be a natural fit for the role of popular girl, but she resists this stereotype. While Enid wears an eclectic mix of vintage fashions, Rebecca’s clothes are plain and generic. She lacks confidence and feels inferior to Enid, and when she learns Enid has applied to college, she feels threatened and becomes defensive. While the prospect of losing her best friend scares Rebecca, there is a sense that the break may ultimately be good for her, allowing her to come into herself. Enid, meanwhile, attempts to define herself in opposition to mass culture. She despises the sameness of strip-mall America and tries to re-create an older, more glamorous world through clothing, culture, and artifacts, although she worries about seeming pretentious. She dreams of running away, losing her past, and becoming a different person, and the ending hints she is on this path.

Ghost World presents an amazingly honest and intimate portrait of female friendship. Enid and Rebecca mirror each other in many ways, and each serves as a repository for the other’s past. They can be casually foul-mouthed and insulting with each other but will defend each other against criticism from outside. The closeness of their friendship is, ironically, what dooms it: Neither girl can grow into a new identity when the other is a constant reminder of their shared past. The inevitability of lost friendship dominates the final chapters of Ghost World, but other losses permeate the work, beginning with childhood. Enid speaks of two stepmothers, but her mother is never mentioned. Did she die, or simply leave? Rebecca lives with her grandmother; her parents are also mysteriously absent. The graffiti “Ghost World,” scrawled on Enid’s garage door and other places throughout the city, underscores a sense of loss and emptiness. The final panel, showing Enid’s bus disappearing into a tunnel, may mean a new beginning for Enid, but the image of a deserted street and empty bench are also suggestive of death.

Impact

Ghost World is a rare example of a modern “alternative” comic that achieved relatively wide popular success without compromise. The second of Clowes’s longer stories to be serialized in Eightball, it showed the maturing of his talent beyond satire, hate rants, and crude humor and featured fully developed characters who were more than stand-ins for the author. Although Enid and Rebecca share some of their creator’s opinions—Enid’s distaste for reggae and the Grateful Dead, for example, is pure Clowes—they are also completely believable as teenage girls.

Reviewers praised Ghost World for its pitch-perfect dialogue and authentic portrayal of teen life, comparing Clowes to Catcher in the Rye’s (1951) author J. D. Salinger. It was popular among both teen and adult readers and, especially in graphic novel format, reached readers not normally interested in comic books.

The popularity of Ghost World and the subsequent film brought Clowes into the mainstream spotlight; he is one of a few comics creators asked to do a strip for The New York Times. In 2009, Ghost World was named one of the “Twenty Best Graphic Novels of the Decade” by Paste Magazine and was ranked number 10 in a list of “The Twenty-Five Greatest Gen X Books of All Time” in Details magazine.

As a pioneer of independent comics in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, Clowes, especially in his focus on realistic characters and settings and introspective themes, has influenced such younger creators as Craig Thompson and Adrian Tomine. In an interview, Clowes acknowledged his influence on Tomine, saying that Tomine grew up reading his work, much as Clowes grew up reading MAD magazine and Crumb.

Films

Ghost World. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists, 2001. Screenplay by Clowes and Zwigoff. This film adaptation stars Thora Birch as Enid and Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca. The film differs from the novel in that it develops a third major character, Seymour (played by Steve Buscemi), not featured in the book, although he somewhat physically resembles Skeetes and contains elements of the unnamed man Enid and Rebecca trick into coming to the diner to meet his dream woman. Zwigoff, director of the documentary Crumb (1994), and Clowes shared an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.

Further Reading

Burns, Charles. Black Hole (1995-2005).

Friedman, Aimee, and Christine Norrie. Breaking Up (2007).

Thompson, Craig. Blankets (2003).

Tomine, Adrian. Optic Nerve (1995-1998).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Summer Blonde (2002).

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith. May Contain Graphic Material: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Film. New York: Praeger, 2007.

Clowes, Daniel, Ken Parille, and Isaac Cates. Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010.

Clowes, Daniel, and Terry Zwigoff. Ghost World: A Screenplay. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001.

Hajdu, David. “Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes.” In Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2009.

Hignite, Todd. “Daniel Clowes.” In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Schwartz, Ben, ed. The Best American Comics Criticism. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010.

Taylor, Craig. “Girls’ World.” The Guardian, November 3, 2001, pp. 60-67.