Ghost World

This week I read Daniel Clowes's Ghost World. The book follows Enid and Rebecca, a couple of cynical teens who deal with their town, its culture, and its people from one day to the next, leading to whether or not Enid leaves for college. They are intelligent, though Enid does a majority of the talking, and it is Enid who appears to be the main character in the story while Rebecca remains a strict secondary. Enid does stick out more--she dresses very differently each day, she is far more critical, and she's far more fearlessly involved in whatever it is that piques her interest. She seems to enjoy being cruel and insensitive on a whim, but with Josh it turned out to be more of a call for attention. Enid seems to loathe just about everything and everyone, though once in a while she reveals herself to be attached to things she hated seconds ago.

I didn't like this comic, though what little we saw in class of the movie was far more interesting and fun to follow. It reads fast-paced, but the topic of conversation changes constantly from one panel to the next and it feels like you might have skipped a piece of information by accident. I did like the humor, and the dialogue was pretty amusing, but as I said before it's just way too dysfunctional in its order. The story also loses my interest due to its lack of a strong plot. I know the comic is weighing the possibility of Enid leaving for college and the love triangle amidst Enid, Rebecca, and Josh, but the story read so quickly that these details were pretty forgettable.

The art was decent though. Everyone looked like an individual and I was surprised that I never had trouble recognizing Enid even if she changed her style every two or three pages. That does not get to happen often enough--usually, you can change the hairstyle of a character and that character will get lost to the reader until someone calls him or her by name. The change of scene, which sometimes happens from one panel to the next on the same row, did trouble me at first, but I got used to it since it fit with the dialogue (which did the very same thing).

I want to watch the movie, because they did add a few scenes in the first twenty minutes of it  that weren't in the comic and still felt like they were pretty canon. It also seemed to have more of a plot/story since the stand-up date they organized in the comic was actually followed in the movie and included as part of the cast.