Reviewers have likened the comic’s dialogue to overheard conversation, imagining Clowes in a restaurant, pen and notebook in hand, furiously transcribing the banter of nearby teenagers, then transferring it to the comics page. Two decades later, readers are still drawn to the characters’ astute, acidic, and ever-relevant profanity-laced observations about the media, advertising, neo-Nazis, “pseudo-bohemian art-school losers,” and all forms of faddishness. “For once in a comic,” the Post said of the graphic novel, “people are portrayed as they really talk and act.” Ghost World’s naturalistic, unfiltered dialogue was especially unusual for female characters, not only those in comics, but in film, television, and novels. Like Maus, Ghost World was a revelation in part because its characters spoke like actual humans rather than the cardboard types that had long populated comic books.

Along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Ghost World is one of the few 1990s comics to remain popular and influential in the overcrowded scene critics call our “new golden age of comics.” Translated into twenty-three languages, it has sold over a quarter of a million copies worldwide. In the decades since its release, its reach has extended far beyond North America. For many readers, Ghost World is the comic that you give your friends to show them the medium’s possibilities. It holds a central place in the history of the North American graphic novel, appearing on countless critics’ and readers’ “best of” lists as well as in numerous college courses. As a 1998 Washington Post review of Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World bluntly acknowledged, “This isn't the golden age of comics.” Yet the review promised that all was not lost: “there are signs of life out there for fans of the medium.” As one such sign it offered Clowes’s masterful graphic novel.Ī sensitive portrait of outsider adolescence in 1990s America, Ghost World was serialized in Clowes’s award-wining comic book Eightball and released as a collection in December of 1997, twenty years ago this month.

Our current good times might make it hard to remember that, a mere twenty years ago, the world was an altogether different place: a comic-book wasteland. Once seen as a vehicle for subliterary kids’ stories and crude comedy, comics now ranks as the artistic equal of the novel and film.

The battle for “comics legitimacy” is over. Features Ghost World at Twenty: Daniel Clowes’s Dialogue

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