Ghost World - History

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. 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. 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. Some of the references in the book (Sassy, etc.) date the book very specifically to the 1990s, which Clowes has said was intentional. 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.