“But the idea of making Ghost World into a movie intrigued him. “I always wanted to work in films but I was always scared that somebody would take it away from me and turn it into something I hated,” he notes. “I thought, ‘Well, here’s my one chance that it might actually be good’. I think Terry and I have a similar sense of humour: we’re both sort of read as being cynical, pessimistic types. But, on some level, we have an optimism that’s born out of our sense of humour: the fact that we can find this absurd comedy from out of tragedy.
“After Terry finished making Crumb years ago,” Clowes continues, “he was sort of fishing around for other projects and he asked Robert Crumb if he could recommend anything. Crumb, I guess, happened to be aware of my work and thought ‘Oh, you might be interested in this thing, Ghost World, that this guy’s working on’. We were both living in the Bay area, so he got in touch with me and we sort of hatched this whole screenplay together.”

Scarlett Johansson as Rebecca

Zwigoff, for his part, never had any doubt who he was going to write the screenplay with. “I went to Dan to begin with because I could tell he was a great writer by reading that comic,” he says. “There was great dialogue, and he already had these two great characters that were rich and detailed. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. “I was being sent all these scripts after Crumb. People wanted me to direct a film, but I just couldn’t connect to anything in the scripts, and I thought maybe Dan and I could come up with something together. There were parts of Ghost World I could strongly identify with and things I could see in myself.”

Thora Birch as Enid

But what about the fact that this is a film about two teenage girls written by two guys a few years either side of 40? Did this ever make them stop and think? Zwigoff laughs. “My greatest fear is that somebody is going to step back and look at this thing carefully and analyse it,” he says, “and see these two, like, completely transparent, arrested adolescents... People don’t know us luckily, so they don’t know what we’re really like. To us, it’s sort of horrifyingly personal at times. It’s a very strange film in that way.”

Casting Ghost World helped to distance it a little. The two girls in the comic strip are played by Thora Birch, who entered adult roles by playing Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening’s daughter in American Beauty; and Scarlett Johansson, who was the traumatised teenager in The Horse Whisperer. Also featured in the film are Steve Buscemi as Seymour, the geeky loser who becomes Enid’s mission in life (one of the funniest features of the comic-book is the girls’ enthusiastic adoption of anything that is sad, unfashionable and generally uncool), and Brad Renfro (Apt Pupil) as the guy that both girls have a crush on.

Enid with Seymour (Steve Buscemi), the geek who becomes her mission in life.