Ghost World

The best book on loneliness I've read. That's all I got to say about it. Read it. This one will give you company and misery in equal measure.

A bit of an unrelatable, exhausting slog with some appealing line work. I'll applaud the last few pages for being poignant.

definitely a 90s fantagraphics comic!

unfortunately they're just like me fr

Story: 5.0 / 10
Characters: 7
Setting: 6.5
Prose: 7.5

I probably would have loved this when it first came out but reading it 20 years later, I am unimpressed; there's so much more graphic novel awesomeness available now.

I saw the movie during my tail end of senior year in high school. I didn't want to accept that growing apart from an attached-at-the-hip best friend was a natural part of life. Now, not only do I understand this, I have lived through this. I think this book does a great job of expressing the subtlety of two people who have outgrown their relationship.

A tale (not even, there was no plot) about two angsty teenage girls that go out of their way to judge anything and everything to compensate for their drastic self loathing. I had watched the movie and thoroughly enjoyed it, then read the book and found that so many changes were made - and for good reason, the book was complete, utter shit.

There was no plot (which is alright if anything else about it was good, but nothing was), the characters had minimal development that had only occurred towards the end. The whole 80 pages were purely two teenage girls fucking with people in the most distasteful way and bitching about them behind their backs whilst also trying to figure out their hopeless futures with their only obstacles being a series of first world problems. I hated every single thing about this book, besides the fact it was so short - I don't think I could've bared anything longer than what it was.

Might have missed the point of this (dystopian teen themes?), but I just found the characters unlikeable and the story gratingly dull. The art was good. But! BIG BUT. I really hate self-perceived “subversive” comix (which I presume this is) drawing intentionally ugly characters and then making them huge jerks. We already have a huge cultural ridiculousness, where beauty is equated with “good”, and ugliness “bad”. So “underground” art which purports to be gritty, realistic, pessimistic, etc, but just has ugly people being ugly and doing ugly things to each other makes me think, bah, so unimaginative.

Hmm. I get why this is kind of a classic of the genre. I liked it, but didn't love it. Perhaps I was not in the right mood for misunderstood teen angst when I read it. Perhaps I am just (eek) too old to be reading it for the first time.

> than the movie, which I saw several years ago now. There's a lot of things I liked...great color palette, great dialogue. I think it's hard to pull off a book, much less a graphic novel, that is full of conversations with very little in the way of visual cues, short on plot, and has an extremely unappealing protagonist. But it works. Love the scene in the grocery store with the Lunchables.