Friday Recommendation: Ghost World

Daniel Clowes has already gotten some love here at Multiversity (you can check out Brian’s Friday Rec for “Wilson” over here), but I thought I’d add to Brian’s thoughts on one of Clowes’ earlier works, “Ghost World”. Like Brian, I encountered the book as a teenager and loved the bajeezus out of it – not to mention the movie, which I must have watched about fifteen times. I too revisited the comic later, and while I still loved the thing, found that the feeling wasn’t the same. Far from being a reflection of the comic’s quality, though, I think that this is a sort of side effect of the book’s greatest strength. Like Catcher in the Rye, “Ghost World” is an insider’s look at adolescence, a highly insular and eccentric look at the problems faced by one maladjusted teenager, Enid Coleslaw. It’s just so damned spot-on in the portrayal of that quiet angst that it kind of fails to compute with those of us who have managed to move past that way of seeing things.

http://multiversitycomics.com/columns/friday-recommendation-ghost-world/