Ghost World

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Ghost World
The latest cover art for Ghost World.
Author(s)	Daniel Clowes
Current status / schedule	Ended
Launch date	September 7, 1993
End Date	April 19, 1997
Genre(s)	Humor, Drama, Satirical

Ghost World is a graphic novel written and illustrated by Daniel Clowes. It was originally serialized in issues #11 through 18 (June 1993 to March 1997) of Clowes's comic book series Eightball,^[1] and was first published in book form in 1997 by Fantagraphics Books. A commercial and critical success, it was very popular with teenage audiences on its initial release and developed into a cult classic. The book has been reprinted in multiple editions^[2] and was the basis for the 2001 feature film of the same name.

Ghost World follows the day-to-day lives of best friends Enid Coleslaw (formerly "Cohn") and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, two cynical, intelligent and often witty teenage girls who have recently graduated from high school in the early 1990s. They spend their days wandering aimlessly around their unnamed American town, criticizing popular culture and the people they encounter while wondering what they will do for the rest of their days. As the comic progresses and Enid and Rebecca make the transition into adulthood, the two develop tensions and drift apart.

Ghost World is admired for its comedic approach to teenage life, friendships, young women and pop culture in general. Ghost World can be seen as a dramatic comic, however, it also makes use of elements of black comedy. Clowes has commented on the story as being an examination of "the lives of two recent high school graduates from the advantaged perch of a constant and (mostly) undetectable eavesdropper, with the shaky detachment of a scientist who has grown fond of the prize microbes in his petri dish."^{[citation needed]} The comic's success led to a movie adaptation of the same name, released in 2001 to critical acclaim and numerous nominations, including an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, which Clowes wrote.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Synopsis 3 Characters 3.1 Enid Coleslaw 3.2 Rebecca Doppelmeyer 3.3 Minor characters 4 History 5 Art work and illustration of Ghost World 5.1 Differences between the comics and the novel 6 Film adaptation 7 Merchandise and spin-off material 8 Works influenced 9 Collections 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Overview

Ghost World takes place in an unnamed town that is full of shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and urban sprawl. The town plays a key part in the narrative, as it is constantly mocked and criticized by Enid and Rebecca. As the story progresses, the background changes dramatically. The phrase "Ghost World" is seen by the characters several times, painted or graffitied on garage doors, signs, and billboards for an undeclared reason. An interpretation of the phrase “ghost world” is that it illustrates the fact that today, everyone seems to be living in their own world, thus making the objective world a “ghost” world. It could signify the existence of people and things on the periphery of ordinary people’s vision, much like flickering images on a television set. The term can also apply to the way in which both Enid and Becky, but especially Enid, are haunted by the past.^[3] In the special features of the film adaptation, it is said to refer to the fact that the town's individuality is being encroached upon by franchises that are seen everywhere.

Critical response to Ghost World was extensive: many critics praised it for its analysis of teenage life, relationships, and the decay of today’s society, while others criticized it for being disconnected and morbid. Some reviews even drew comparisons to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1950). The Village Voice stated that “Clowes spells out the realities of teen angst as powerfully and authentically as Salinger did in Catcher in the Rye for an earlier generation.”^[4] The Guardian praised the strip's illustrations and visuals, saying “it is beautifully drawn, with subtle and convincing storylines. A classic portrait of teenage life” and Time magazine called it an “instant classic”.

[edit] Synopsis

Enid Coleslaw (her father had their surname legally changed from "Cohn" before she was born) and Rebecca (Becky) Doppelmeyer are two cynical, intelligent teenage girls who are best friends in the 1990s. They have recently graduated from high school and spend their days wandering around their unnamed town criticizing pop culture and the people they encounter while wondering what they're going to do with the rest of their lives. They are attracted to boys, in theory, but also unhappily entertain the possibility that they might be lesbians. Their friendship is very close, but as the book goes on tensions between them build, especially over Enid's plans to move away to college. They also have a quiet friend named Josh; throughout the book the two girls enjoy teasing him, but they are also attracted to him and eventually a romantic triangle of sorts forms.

A section in the middle of the story features Clowes (referred to as David Clowes) in a cameo, as a cartoonist that Enid admires and with whom she is infatuated, but finds creepy and a "perv" when she actually sees him. The comic ends with Enid and Rebecca separating; while they speak half-heartedly of "getting together sometime", the easy intimacy they once knew is long gone. Rebecca is now in a relationship with Josh and seems on her way to settling into a "normal" life, while Enid, having failed to get into college, is as much of a misfit as ever and finally leaves town alone to start a new life.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Enid Coleslaw

Impulsive, cynical and bitter, the strip's lead character drifts through her life without care, criticizing almost everyone she meets. Enid Coleslaw is an 18-year-old teenager^[5], who has recently graduated from her high school, with best friend Rebecca Doppelmeyer. Enid takes an interest in playing pranks on other people, purely for her own benefit, especially a classmate named Josh who may be Enid’s love interest. Enid also enjoys anything morbid, forcing her friend Josh to take her to a pornographic store, saying “...Becky and I are dying to go in there, but we can't get any boys to take us...” Clowes said of Enid’s character “When I started out I thought of her as this id creature . . . Then I realized halfway through that she was just more vocal than I was, but she has the same kind of confusion, self-doubts and identity issues that I still have -- even though she's 18 and I'm 39!".^[6]

Enid’s eventual fate in Ghost World is not explicitly shown; however, she does pack her bags and leave the city on a bus after her relationship with Rebecca ends. Some readers interpret this final section as a metaphor for suicide^{[citation needed]}. This interpretation can be supported by a few subtle indications in the text: ‘Norman’ at the bus stop, the cemetery pictured in the table of contents, Enid’s hearse for sale, and a panel depicting Enid’s father and Carol looking very mournfully at an object not pictured^{[original research?]}. However, interpretation and significance is ultimately left up to each individual reader. One extratextual factor mitigating against this interpretation is that Enid (as well as Rebecca) makes a cameo appearance as an old lady in Clowes's Dan Pussey collection of comics. Pussey is a self-important, nerdy superhero comics artist, and the book ends in the future as Pussey dies alone and unloved, with Rebecca and Enid as two bitter crones in his rest home going through his possessions. When they discover his stash of "silly books" (comic books), they wonder, "What would a grown man want with such foolishness?"

Enid Coleslaw is also an anagram of "Daniel Clowes".

[edit] Rebecca Doppelmeyer

Rebecca Doppelmeyer, the secondary protagonist of Ghost World is a far more passive and naive character than Enid, as she has a more mainstream personality – while Enid enjoys more peculiar things in life, Rebecca enjoys things that most teenage girls of her age would take an interest in; for example, she reads a teen magazine (Sassy) that was popular among young women in the early to mid 1990s (Enid, while criticising Rebecca for owning the magazine, still peruses it), and is also sexually curious about men, having a crush on Josh. Rebecca spends much of the novel either following Enid, to whom she feels inferior, to places she has become fascinated with or listening to Enid talk about the various ins and outs of her life, usually responding in a disinterested and/or sarcastic manner -- in fact, most of the time, her responses have nothing to do with what Enid is talking about. She has no particular aspiration in life, clinging to and obsessing over the past. In the end of the novel, Rebecca matures into a sensible young woman. It is made ambiguous whether she pursued a relationship with Josh.

[edit] Minor characters

Beyond Enid and Rebecca, there are many minor and recurring characters in the comic strip:

Josh

A cynical employee at a self-service convenience store. Both Enid and Rebecca are infatuated with him at different points in the story.

Melorra

An overachieving, perky and popular classmate of Enid and Rebecca who seems to unexpectedly appear out of the blue wherever Enid and Rebecca may be.

Bob Skeetes

Early in the book is referred to as the “creepy Don Knotts guy”.

Oomi

Rebecca’s fragile old grandmother, with whom the girls spend a night.

Norman

An old man who waits on a bench for a bus that never comes.

Enid's father and girlfriend

Enid’s effeminate father and his girlfriend Carol, who resurfaces from Enid's past.

Allen, or "Weird Al"

The waiter at the fake 1950s diner called Hubba Hubba (the name is changed to Wowsville in the film).

John Ellis

An acquaintance of Enid and Becky's, who often associates with them despite their dislike of him. John Ellis is obsessed with stereotypically "morbid" and "offensive" things, such as nazis, serial killers, child pornography, guns, circus freaks, torture, snuff films, and so forth. He is referred to as having a zine called Mayhem which runs stories on these topics.

Johnny Apeshit

A former punk rocker and heroin addict turned would-be businessman, who is famous among the girls for spray painting the word "anarchy" on Enid's dads car.

Naomi

A classmate of Enid and Rebecca, called along with Melorra by Enid, "the junior JAPs of America". Enid tells Naomi the story of her first sexual experience and suggests that the two have a casual friendship.

Allen Weinstein

The boy with whom Enid had her first sexual experience. He smokes pot, listens to reggae and is interested in counter-culture as a way of rebelling against his wealthy parents.

Satanic couple

A satanic couple who eat at the diner Enid frequents, Angel's. They may not actually be satanic, but rather appear that way in Enid’s imagination. Enid makes fun of their use of an umbrella in broad daylight (an umbrella can often be used as a sunshade).

[edit] History

Ghost World was first conceived in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Daniel Clowes, when he was a teenager. Much of the comic is partially inspired by Clowes's own life, for example, Clowes moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and he has said that the town in the story is a visual combination of both places. ^[7] Most of the novel was not written in chronological order. Clowes began writing Ghost World on September 9, 1993, and stated that he created the first chapter without any plans to continue it.

Clowes also credits as having drawn some inspiration from the film The World of Henry Orient, in which two curious young girls stalk a middle-aged man who is having an affair.^[8] In the book, Enid and Rebecca are obsessed with various strange people in the neighborhood, including “The Satanists" and a psychic named Bob Skeetes.

Many readers have tried to interpret where the title Ghost World comes from; Clowes has said it comes from something he saw scrawled on a building in his Chicago neighborhood.^{[citation needed]} Some of the references in the book (Sassy, etc.) date the book very specifically to the 1990s, which Clowes has said was intentional.^{[citation needed]} He wanted to emulate the way that throwaway cultural references in The Catcher in the Rye root the novel in a time and place.

The series was a major departure for Clowes, who had previously populated Eightball with considerably more outlandish material. Clowes has said in interviews that he chose two teenage girls for his protagonists partly because he could use them to express his more cynical opinions without readers taking the characters as author surrogates.

[edit] Art work and illustration of Ghost World

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Clowes has said he chose the pale blue coloring for the book because he wanted to reflect the experience of walking home in the twilight, when every house has a television on and the living rooms are bathed in a ghostly blue light.^{[citation needed]} He also made various changes to the artwork between the original issues and the book collection, perhaps most notably changing Becky's face early in the story so it more closely matches her appearance at the end.

[edit] Differences between the comics and the novel

With one exception, in which a small amount of yellow was included, the comics as they originally appeared in Eightball employed only two colors; the early chapters were in black and dark blue, then black and a lighter shade of blue later on, and black and light green for the final two chapters. The graphic novel reprint uses this light green and black color scheme throughout.

The character design also changed significantly during the original run of the story, with characters' faces becoming cleaner and less detailed, indicative of a shift in Clowes's changing aesthetic in all his comics, eschewing the minute facial details that had long been one of his trademarks, for more simplified designs. The character of John Ellis, for example, had significant shading and cross-hatching on his face in the original comics, where in the book he has a simpler, uncluttered design. Another striking example is a panel on the second page of the first chapter that shows Rebecca reading a magazine. In the original comic, her eyes and chin are shaded in, her hair reaches her shoulders, and she appears to be scowling. In the graphic novel, this panel was redrawn, softening and lightening Rebecca's features. Enid's appearance was also reworked in this panel, and in several others in the first chapter of the book.

The graphic novel includes five new drawings on the copyright, table of contents, aknowledgments, and other prefatory pages. These new drawings are tableaux of events in the characters' lives that take place prior to the story, including their high school graduation, and a graveyard visit, presumably either for Rebecca's parents (who are never seen or mentioned in the story, though the girl lives with her grandmother) or Enid's mother (who is similarly absent). Interestingly, the graduation scene, which shows the two girls in caps and gowns, and Enid giving the finger, was recreated in the film version.

As with Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, the chapters of the story were given names in the novel, and a table of contents was added to reflect this.

[edit] Film adaptation

The book was made into a 2001 movie, Ghost World, directed by Terry Zwigoff (also known for his award-winning documentary about underground cartoonist Robert Crumb). Thora Birch played Enid, Scarlett Johansson played Rebecca, and Steve Buscemi played Seymour (a composite character, based on elements from the comic characters of Bob Skeetes, Bearded Windbreaker, and Josh). Christina Ricci was at one time considered for the role of Enid, but by the time the project started to come together she had become too old for the part. Also, as Clowes believed that Ricci had made a transition from an independent actress and become hugely successful in mainstream audiences, she was turned down.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Merchandise and spin-off material

A collection of merchandise and spin-off material for Ghost World has been sold since its release, some of it still available today. This includes a three alternate versions of dolls of Enid. One is available from Fantagraphics with artwork by Clowes depicting Enid having various adventures, and comes with objects featured in the comic (such as the mask she buys from the pornographic store), another "Little Enid" from the Eightball comic, and an Enid/Rebecca pairing with the likeness of voodoo dolls. The price ranges from US$10–35.

[edit] Works influenced

The comic was the influence for Aimee Mann's song "Ghost World" on her album Bachelor No. 2 (2000).^[9]

[edit] Collections

• Hardcover Edition: ISBN 1-56097-280-7 Fantagraphics Books (December 1, 1997)
• Paperback Edition: ISBN 1-56097-427-3 Fantagraphics Books; 4th edition (April 1, 2001)
• Paperback Edition: ISBN 1-56097-427-3 Fantagraphics Books; 13th edition (December, 2005)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Fansite which includes a sypnosis and collection of critical reviews for the comic
• Detailed fansite for the book and film adaptation