Ghost World

Daniel Clowes’s “Ghost World” was a hauntingly beautiful book that reminded me much of “Black Hole”, but with a different, more subtle approach to the same ideas of isolation, sexual initiation and the pain of growing up, a lost generation… There is the same juxtaposition of monsters and the modern world in “Ghost World”, but it doesn’t have the magical-realism-overtness of “Black Hole”. Still, the protagonists take delight in the grotesqueries of their own suburb: the Satanists and a host of other bizarre-looking specimens, most of whom are men (Norman, Weird Al, Bob Skeetes, the man they trick at the diner, the homeless man, the alter ego David Clowes… here the incurable disease seems to be loneliness). Also, the image of the unfortunate Carrie Vandenburg and her neck tumor on page 23 is straight up Charles Burns. There was something similar in the methods of illustration between the two as well – a sharpness to the lines and white spaces. But I thought that the images in “Ghost World” seemed a little bit more pop arty, especially because of the unusual use of the teal tinting. Though this also had the effect that the panels were bathed in a sinister and sickly light, or as if the reader was watching the world through the Night Vision of a camera lens.

I fell a little bit in love with Enid and her disaffected pseudo-intellectualism, bizarre outfits, and self-loathing right from the beginning, but over the course of the novel I became more and more intrigued by the character of Rebecca. Though she is the more conventionally pretty one of the duo, and slightly more socially adroit, she fades into the background and bemoans the fact that “Deep down every single boy likes her [Enid] better!” (70). Her last name is repeatedly punned as “Doppelganger”, implying that she is a clone. Also, originally, the term “doppelganger” had a creepier meaning – a ghostly being that haunted its lookalike, and sometimes was a death omen for its human counterpart. This relates back to the ambiguous and eerie title of the book.

The title was an unsettling, unresolved aspect of the novel without a simple interpretation. As in everything else that we have read, there is a healthy dose of death in this comic – there is the hearse, and next to the table of contents we see a younger Enid and Rebecca standing in a cemetery (in front of the grave of Enid’s real mother?). The town where the two girls live is a dead one, a concrete one, overrun with strip malls and fast food restaurants. The 50’s diner that our protagonists frequent is itself a weak ghost – a pathetic replica of something long gone. Perhaps Clowes is drawing a parallel between himself and the phantom-like, anonymous artist in the book who runs around graffiti-ing walls and garage doors. The idea of scrawling over surfaces, the name Norman traced into the concrete panel, in a convoluted way relate back to a murky concept of what comics are – creating a static visual symbol and leaving some kind of mark on the surface of society.