Daniel Clowes’ original comic book

Clowes admits that it was, at first, pretty odd seeing his line-drawings become flesh and blood. “It was extremely strange,” he says, “because the first day I saw the screen test of the two girls up there, they looked so exactly like my drawings that I felt almost omnipotent, you know? ‘I’ve created these two humans!’ It was really a strange feeling. I felt like I was going to go outside and see my dead grandmother pull up in our old stationwagon, or some other vision out of my brain. You know, I could draw it and it would happen? ”

“But the performances that the girls gave were thrilling for me to watch. It was such an amazing thing to see it done so well. I can imagine how truly horrible it would be to see it done wrong. Luckily it was done very right.” Halfon expects to have Ghost World complete by the end of the year. Clowes, meanwhile, is going back to the drawing table, with an all-colour special issue of Eightball, the series in which Ghost World first appeared. But the experience of working on a film has definitely affected him. “I learned so much about what I can now go home and do in my comics,” he says. “This is all part of the continuum, so we’ll see what happens.”