Ghost World (comics)

Impulsive, cynical, foul-mouthed and bitter, the strip's lead character drifts through her life without care, criticizing almost everyone she meets. Enid Coleslaw is an 18-year-old,[5] who has recently graduated from her high school, with best friend Rebecca Doppelmeyer. Enid takes an interest in playing pranks on other people, purely for her own benefit, especially a classmate named Josh who she attempts to seduce. Clowes said of Enid's character: "When I started out I thought of her as this id creature... Then I realized halfway through that she was just more vocal than I was, but she has the same kind of confusion, self-doubts and identity issues that I still have – even though she's 18 and I'm 39!"[3]

Enid (as well as Rebecca) makes a cameo appearance as an old lady in Clowes's Pussey collection of comics. Pussey is a self-important, nerdy superhero comics artist, and the book ends in the future as Pussey dies alone and unloved, with Rebecca and Enid as two bitter crones in his rest home going through his possessions. When they discover his stash of "silly books" (comic books), they wonder, "What would a grown man want with such foolishness?" Enid Coleslaw is also an anagram of "Daniel Clowes".

Rebecca Doppelmeyer is Enid's best friend. Rebecca lives with her grandmother and acts as a caretaker to her. She has a bit more mainstream personality – while Enid enjoys more peculiar things in life, Rebecca enjoys things that most teenage girls of her age would take an interest in; for example, she reads a popular teen magazine, and is also more interested in men, and is described by Enid as "a skinny blonde wasp" and therefore embodies "what every guy wants." Rebecca and Enid spend much of the novel hanging out around the town together and making fun of others. In the end of the novel, Rebecca matures into a sensible young woman and pursues a relationship with Josh in place of her friendship with Enid as the two characters grow apart as they mature from teenagers into young adults.

Beyond Enid and Rebecca, there are many minor and recurring characters in the comic strip:

• Josh, a soft-spoken employee at a self-service convenience store. Both Enid and Rebecca are infatuated with him at different points in the story.
• Melorra, an overachieving, perky and popular classmate of Enid and Rebecca who seems to unexpectedly appear out of the blue wherever Enid and Rebecca may be.
• Bob Skeetes, an astrologer that early in the book is referred to as the "creepy Don Knotts guy".
• Oomi, Rebecca's fragile old grandmother, with whom Rebecca lives.
• Norman, an old man who waits on a bench for a bus that never comes.
• Enid's somewhat effeminate father and his girlfriend Carol, who resurfaces from Enid's past.
• Allen, or "Weird Al", the waiter at the fake 1950s diner called Hubba Hubba (the name is changed to Wowsville in the film).
• John Ellis, an enemy of Enid and Becky's, who often associates with them despite their dislike of him. John Ellis is obsessed with morbid and offensive things, such as Nazis, serial killers, child pornography, guns, circus freaks, torture, snuff films, and so forth. He is referred to as having a zine called Mayhem which runs stories on these topics.
• Johnny Apeshit, a former punk rocker and heroin addict turned would-be businessman, who is famous among the girls for spray painting the word "anarchy" on Enid's dad's car.
• Naomi, a classmate of Enid and Rebecca, called along with Melorra by Enid, "the junior JAPs of America". Enid tells Naomi the story of her first sexual experience and suggests that the two have a casual friendship.
• Allen Weinstein, the boy with whom Enid had her first sexual experience. He smokes marijuana, listens to reggae and is interested in counterculture as a way of rebelling against his wealthy parents.
• The Satanists, a middle-aged couple who eat at the diner Enid frequents, Angel's. They may not actually be satanic, but rather appear that way in Enid's imagination (probably due to the fact that the male of the relationship bears a resemblance to Anton LaVey).

Clowes made various changes to the artwork between the original issues and the book collection, such as changing Becky's face early in the story so it more closely matches her appearance at the end.

The comics as they originally appeared in Eightball employed only two colors; the early chapters were in black and dark blue, then black and a lighter shade of blue later on, and black and light green for the final two chapters. The graphic novel reprint uses this light green and black color scheme throughout. There is one inadvertent exception: in Eightball #16, a printing error led to the entire chapter being published in an orange tone instead of a blue one. "No one quite knows how or why this happened," wrote Clowes in The Complete Eightball, a 2015 compilation of the comic that faithfully reproduces the mistake.

The character design also changed significantly during the original run of the story, with characters' faces becoming cleaner and less detailed, indicative of a shift in Clowes's changing aesthetic in all his comics, eschewing the minute facial details that had long been one of his trademarks, for more simplified designs. The character of John Ellis, for example, had significant shading and cross-hatching on his face in the original comics, where in the book he has a simpler, uncluttered design. Another striking example is a panel on the second page of the first chapter that shows Rebecca reading a magazine. In the original comic, her eyes and chin are shaded in, her hair reaches her shoulders, and she appears to be scowling. In the graphic novel, this panel was redrawn, softening and lightening Rebecca's features. Enid's appearance was also reworked in this panel, and in several others in the first chapter of the book.

The graphic novel includes five new drawings on the copyright, table of contents, acknowledgments, and other prefatory pages. These new drawings are tableaux of events in the characters' lives that take place prior to the story, including their high school graduation, and a graveyard visit, presumably either for Rebecca's parents (who are never seen or mentioned in the story, though the girl lives with her grandmother) or Enid's mother (who is similarly absent). The graduation scene, which shows the two girls in caps and gowns, and Enid giving the finger, was recreated in the film version.

As with Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, the chapters of the story were given names in the novel, and a table of contents was added to reflect this.