Retrospective - Not So Comical

I can think of a number of American writers of comic books who excel at bleakness, emptiness, ennui: Harvey Pekar, of American Splendour fame, Chris Ware, specifically in Jimmy Corrigan, and Daniel Clowes. Of the three it seems to me that Clowes is the most single-minded and convincing. This is especially so in Ghost World, the comic I treated myself to back in Manchester, and which I read in little more than an afternoon.

There's a coldness, a lack of affect (I think that's what psychologists call it) to his teenage protagonists Enid and Rebecca that paradoxically manages to be quite touching, I suppose because it is so obviously willed. They stare out at the reader challengingly, blankly on the back cover, an image that sums up Clowes's strength as an artist - his highly stylised faces evoke rich yet mysterious inner lives in counterpoint to the icily accurate dialogue he gives his characters.

You feel that Clowes knows his characters through and through but carefully selects what he allows his audience to learn about them. There's so much going on in the margins here. This economy gives his stories, insofar as there are actual stories, a kind of pace and leaves you wanting more, yet oddly satisfied that you're not going to get it.

There's a quote from a review on the back cover referring, inevitably, to teenage angst but that doesn't come close to doing justice to the genuine melancholy of the lives on show here or, for that matter, to the reality of people's feelings regardless of their age. The page where Enid finds out she's failed her entrance test to Strathmore (which, of course, she's not supposed to care about) calls out to be read by anyone who's ever celebrated acing their exams.