The rarer fact is that similar sensibilities shared by the pair are the reason that the 41-year-old comics star was allowed to participate in every stage of "Ghost World," the movie—from the many drafts, pitches, the shooting, re-shoots, sound mixes and edits, and likely continuing through the duration of their just-aborning project, an adaptation of another Clowes comic, "Art School Confidential."

From its first shots, "Ghost World" is a brilliant singularity that travels from hilarious, sardonic observation to acute melancholy. It's the summer after high school. Two precocious, sarcastic, foul-mouthed friends, Enid (disdainful, round-faced, wary-eyed Thora Birch) and Rebecca (impossibly throaty-voiced Scarlett Johansson) whose ways will soon part, plan how to waste the coming months before adulthood beckons. Zwigoff and Clowes manage an unlikely feat of literary ventriloquism, pouring their own concerns about the corruption of our modern culture into a story about the frustrations of two still-unfinished adolescent girls. "Ghost World" portrays a world of many subcultures, suggesting that anyone who doesn't go with the flow of "adulthood" as defined by advertising and marketing is inevitably a subculture of one.

Intense, poignant and droll, Birch's fearless performance, filled with priceless glowers, is nothing shy of exquisite. Slowly, the story becomes more about this sass-lass' baby steps toward maturity, neglecting Rebecca, and developing her improbable friendship with middle-aged record collector Seymour (a restrained and touching Steve Buscemi), who to Enid's young eyes seems almost so uncool he's cool. Zwigoff's every shot is layered, with a pictorial simplicity and directness that is still stuffed with cool artifacts or odd goings-on in the corner of the frame. Or, as Zwigoff told me recently, "I spent a lot of time in this film trying to get things like that to seem real. I just tried to set up shots that seemed right for the scene. Maybe I've watched too many Laurel and Hardy movies, but I tried to keep it pretty straightforward and in keeping with the deadpan tone of the comedy. Maybe it was partly a reaction against all the ostentatious shots you see in films these days. I actually get more inspired by seeing really bad films and getting angry and thinking 'Jeeziz, I can do better than this at least!'"

"Ghost World: A Screenplay" (Fantagraphics Books, $16.95) has just been published, containing the shooting script, which demonstrates the virtues of scrupulous film editing. It's a much better tale on the screen than it is on the page. Extras include a visit with Enid and Rebecca poolside after becoming "all famous and everything"; continuity Polaroids from the production; annotations about many of the props and drawings, plus Zwigoff's take on the film's array of music and why it was chosen. There are introductions by both Zwigoff and Clowes as well, along the lines of the writer's admiration for his director's murky outlook on everything: "As a lifelong complainer/exaggerator myself, I can only admire his championship technique. He makes it look easy."

Since late last year, Clowes has been in promotion mode, talking to all comers about his collaboration with Zwigoff, and his perspective is a fresh, even jocular one on the ever-harsh realities of trying to get asses on seats for a modest, human-scaled picture. We talked a couple months before the film's opening at the tidy new home in Oakland, California that he shares with his wife, Erika, and a number of small animals, not all of them imaginary. Clowes' office is uncommonly tidy, a feat he ascribes more to having recently moved than to the overly meticulous nature that some interviewers have ascribed to him.

Clowes and I also spoke after the film's New York and Los Angeles openings in August. Quick to laugh and quicker to giggle, Enid and Rebecca's genial petulance, a few scowls shy of cynicism, is easy to spot in their creator's chipper disdain for all things inauthentic.

PRIDE: I am so sick of reading about this damn movie.

CLOWES: Me, too.

PRIDE: When it is all going to end?

CLOWES: When will it die?! [laughs]

PRIDE: I liked it even more a second go-round when I saw it opening day in New York. The Angelika's not my favorite theater, but at least they played it loud.

CLOWES: Everybody seems to sort of like it better the third or fourth time they see it.

PRIDE: The critics of North America have taken it upon themselves to vomit superlatives all over "Ghost World." The reviews are loving, but they take a long time to get to what's good about the picture. But so many of the reviews are using this movie as a cudgel against other studio pictures.

CLOWES: All of that stuff is a good angle, but I'm getting concerned.

PRIDE: If you knew vaguely nothing about a movie, wouldn't comments like that seem off-putting to you?

CLOWES: Sure. And the thing is? It is a studio film. That should be the story, "Wow, these guys made a film with a movie studio and it came out pretty good. It can be done." Not y'know, "What happened, somebody screwed up."

PRIDE: "Where did we go right?!"

CLOWES: Exactly. Everybody calls [me and starts the interview], "Well, OK, I'm ready to hear the horror stories." It's like, "Well, it wasn't that bad." We had some bad meetings early on, but MGM's actually always been perfectly nice.

PRIDE: I don't think I've read an unsympathetic piece yet.

CLOWES: Oh! Then you haven't read Mr. Rex Reed's review. [laughs] Actually, I haven't read it. I looked in Variety and they had the list of pro and con [opinions from reviewers around the country]. There were all pros, except we had one mixed, and the one con was Reed, [New York] Observer. I can actually see it in my head, him making fun of the way Thora and Steve look... I can just see him saying, "Steve Buscemi has all the charm of a wet basset hound," y'know, something like that, a cliché that nobody understands exactly.

PRIDE: Did the New Yorker piece, making you the comics genius of the week, lack for salacious revelations for you? Did you read it?

CLOWES: Yeah, I just read it. It was, I don't know, it was OK. Those kind of things are always uncomfortable.

PRIDE: Like with the movie reviews, even that piece, which is very informed and a good read, and says great things about your work, it still seems to protest: Geez, there's all this great work in comics and graphic novels, why aren't they appreciated? They're masters of their domain! It's almost like jumping up and down, yelling, "A man with a small penis can be a great lover!"

CLOWES: [laughs] Right. It really does have that quality. I don't blame these guys. They have to sit through so many horrible movies. To have some way to get back at all that, it's hard to find fault.

PRIDE: What do all these conversations do to your daily routine of getting Eight Ball done?

CLOWES: It's actually not so bad. Usually even when I have absolutely nothing to do during the day, I tend to waste a lot of time and look for a lot of little tasks to do so I don't feel like I'm just strapped to the drawing board. I always have something to do until three or so in the afternoon before I get to work. So I try to schedule all these press sort of things in the afternoon. That's what I do now instead of walk down the street to get a bagel or something. It makes for an odd day. Talk about yourself for three hours. It's like therapy or something.

PRIDE: Since I know you saw the original "Ghost World" graffiti in a Chicago neighborhood we both lived in, it's funny to read that it was scrawled in an alley in "a really bad neighborhood," which actually was thoroughly gentrified more than a couple years back.

CLOWES: [laughs] I like to say that. Just because it's amusing to my friends who still live in that "really bad neighborhood." At the time, it wasn't a good neighborhood. Not yet.

PRIDE: Can you remember today exactly where that nudge of inspiration was?

CLOWES: This was written very small on a garage. It was north of Division, south of Wicker Park. I could find the street, but I don't know the name of the street. I would see it like once a week when I took an offbeat route to the Jewel on Ashland. I went to look for it a couple of years ago and it had been rehabbed.

PRIDE: I've started taking more photos of just ordinary crap because ordinary crap tends—

CLOWES: —to disappear. I wish to God I had just taken a video of my daily life [in Chicago]. Because it's completely gone.

PRIDE: Did you talk about that phrase right away?

CLOWES: I don't think I ever said anything. It was just something I saw and wrote down in a sketchbook. Then it was such a good name... for something. It just said it all, kind of.

PRIDE: It is a great title, and one that I would resist interpreting, it's so poetically suggestive you want to just let it float.

CLOWES: Oh yeah. I love how... It says so much about everybody, how they interpret that title. [What they come up with] says so much more about the people watching the film than the film itself. There are certain things in the movie that clearly work just great, and there's nothing anyone could say bad about them. Then you'll find somebody who'll criticize. You think, how could that be? How could you think that way? How could you like the rest of the film and not think this part was good?

PRIDE: One of the most gratifyingly weird audience reactions was the laughter to the two times you show a pair of faded jeans, limp on the sidewalk. Enid notes it the first time, but the second time, we just see it and the audience laughs like they were happy to be goosed.

CLOWES: It gets an interesting laugh. It gets it that second time, which we didn't anticipate. It was kind of a hard joke, it's not a joke exactly, we wanted it to have that air, they say it offhandedly. First readings, it was like "Hey look! It's the pants!" I said, no, no, they see this every day, they just say it because they jabber a lot and that's the way they talk. Then they finally got it: [flat] "Hey, look. It's the pants."

PRIDE: The opening's so direct and great: the obscure, insurgent bit of Indian 1960s rock-and-roll coming out of somewhere while we track along the windows, each of the families caught in their little boxes, their little comic panels, then we arrive at Enid, this inchoate artist and girl dervish twirling to the video of the musical in her blood red graduation gown. It's Terry quietly, with assurance, announcing, "This is very quiet, kids, but I know what I'm doing."

CLOWES: We're very happy with how that came out. We had intended a much bigger opening where you're sort of traveling down the street, you see people on the street and you get a glimpse of the whole world. But it kept not working. We finally pared it down to the simple thing of looking into these frames.

PRIDE: I know a director whose notes on scripts are very genteel, usually starting, "If budget permits..."

CLOWES: [laughs] I should write my entire next script with that as the opening line of every scene!

PRIDE: How many audiences have you seen it with?

CLOWES: Maybe five. Only two were completely unaffiliated with the film. We had our premiere in Los Angeles and it was sort of industry people who had never seen it and half people who had worked on the film. We could see half the theater laughing and the other half blushing at their performances or looking at little details and going, "Oops!"

PRIDE: I know you and Terry took several years developing and writing this script. You go back to the comic, and it's strange. First, to see how much Scarlett and Thora suit the drawings of Rebecca and Enid.

CLOWES: It's eerie, actually. I picked her because I thought she was a really interesting actress. We had a whole bunch of tapes and they were all really uninteresting. Then all of a sudden I saw her, and I said, here's what I envisioned for Rebecca. We had to work very hard to get her in the film. They wanted somebody much more bankable. But she didn't look so much like the character in the tape. But when she showed up...

PRIDE: And that smoky teenage-gravel voice. Could you have imagined Rebecca sounds like that?

CLOWES: I had thought of Enid having a squeaky voice, but it's great to have Scarlett's in there. Somebody said, she sounds like she's Brenda Vaccaro's daughter. [laughs]

PRIDE: The voice makes it seem like she's book-ended with Enid's jabbery meanness. We assume she's thinking it, too, because she has such a mature, sexy deadpan in her voice.

CLOWES: She doesn't need to try so hard. But it does imply that she gave up smoking at 11!

PRIDE: Then you find the bits you've kept from the comic that are utterly atomized, scattered in odd ways throughout the picture. I'm sure people's memories are blurred about what they read several years back.

CLOWES: We get a lot of that. I did a little comic strip for the CD book, "the lost scene from the movie," you have Seymour making a compilation tape for Enid. My own publisher reads it and asks, 'Was that in the comic?' "Seymour actually wasn't in the comic, if you'll recall!" I had to say.

PRIDE: Terry does one wonderful performance thing with Thora I haven't seen anyone note: hiding behind her various glasses, she has this gloriously advanced, smart girlish sensibility and her round face is very striking. But when she takes off the glasses, her eyes are less defined, childish, vulnerable... and her round face is babyish.

CLOWES: That was all in the script. We had all that figured out early on. The published version of the shooting script has a lot of pages that made it into some cut at some point [but were cut].

PRIDE: Both the comic and the movie take place in a deracinated modern world of commercialized mediocrity. You've lived on the West Coast for a number of years, the movie was shot in L.A., you grew up and spent many years in Chicago. Is there a particular topography you mean to evoke when you draw or when you and Terry were working on the movie? I think my favorite shot in Ghost World is toward the end, it feels like a final shot although it isn't. After being in this daylit mini-mall land, we see Enid at twilight, and she passes a mall with depressingly recognizable brand names, and at the end, in full close-up, she's haloed by this beautiful red, which in fact, is an out-of-focus Radio Shack sign.

CLOWES: Yeah. That was something we put there very consciously. That was actually a re-shoot. We felt we needed to see that world at that moment.

PRIDE: To integrate your and Terry's stylized version of the world with the world we live in?

CLOWES: Yeah. That's the point at the story where she's stuck, there's really no way out. We wanted that to be where she's stuck. This brightly lit, hellish world of Anytown, USA, some undefined American city. It's funny, right in the background of that shot is the Hollywood sign. We had to frame that out very carefully. That would have made a very different message! We tried very hard not to have palm trees. But there are some things that are unavoidable. There are L.A. banners in the background in some shots. And the worst, the most glaring error that nobody noticed until we were doing the very final sound mix, when the two girls are in the restaurant, watching the Satanists, there's a menu, and you can very clearly see the 213 area code. So much for authenticity.

PRIDE: Hey, everywhere is L. A.

CLOWES: That's right.

PRIDE: Brave New Latte.

CLOWES: Yep. We just thought L.A. was the perfect place to shoot because it's way ahead of the curve in terms of the strip-mall-ization of the world.