Rebel Without A Clue. Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World.

Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World might be 16 years old, but it feels right at home as the counterpoint to contemporary cinema.

The superhero boom was in its infancy when Zwigoff collaborated with Daniel Clowes on an adaptation of the latter’s comic-strip. Originally published in Clowes’ anthology magazine, Eightball, and collected in a celebrated graphic novel volume, Ghost World plays as an anti-coming-of-age drama, telling the story of Enid and Rebecca, a pair of friends whose relationship gradually decays as the two face life after high school.

Zwigoff’s film, which is expanded from a fleeting moment in Clowes’ original comic, captures the spirit and the tone of the source material in note-perfect fashion. As these things go, Ghost World is perhaps most comparable to a movie like Robert Altman’s Popeye, or Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Fidelity to the inspirational matter is inarguable, and yet the film remains a work of clear directorial authority.

Growing up at the turn of the century Clowes’ Enid, a figure who was at the centre of a minor pop culture phenomena around the time the film opened, was the natural evolutionary leap for the average comic-book store dwelling geek in search of a figure to look toward once Peter Parker, comics most notable teen, began to seem old-hat and old-fashioned. Enid’s sardonic wit and wide-eyed exasperation with the modern world made for a refreshing, brutal vessel for adolescent concerns. The enduring appeal of Clowes’ portraits of dysfunctional, real people has led me to joke that, some half a lifetime on from first discovering his work, while one might aspire towards growing up to be Batman or Superman, reality has it that one is more likely to be one of Clowes’ merry band of oddballs and freaks.

While it remains a cult classic, Zwigoff’s movie deserves a place in the canon of great comic-book movies, occupying a space on the lonely fringes of non-superhero fare based on such material, alongside the likes of David Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour.