For Fans of Ghost World

Zwigoff's 2001 film is one of the rare adaptations that genuinely adds to its source without diluting it. Clowes co-wrote the screenplay and folded in Enid's obsession with 78 rpm records and the character of Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonely crate-digger who barely appears in the comic. The result is a film about two kinds of outsiders who briefly orbit each other before their trajectories separate. It is funnier and sadder than the book in different places, and both are better for existing.

Enid Coleslaw's withering commentary on everything around her is frequently misread as pure misanthropy. But Clowes is writing about the gap between the self you perform for other people and the self you cannot quite locate. The cruelty in Ghost World is a defense mechanism. Clowes's other books, David Boring especially, make this clearer: his characters are not above the world they mock. They are frightened of it.

Ghost World sits in a tradition of confessional fiction that runs from Salinger through the 1990s alternative-comics boom. Clowes, Chris Ware, Seth, and Adrian Tomine were doing for comics what Raymond Carver had done for short fiction: stripping away plot machinery and foregrounding voice, embarrassment, and ordinary disappointment. Readers who loved Ghost World and never explored that prose shelf are missing half the conversation.

Mae Borowski returns to her dying rust-belt hometown with no plan and too much self-awareness, and she spends the game failing to fit back in anywhere. Night in the Woods is not a direct adaptation of anything, but it is clearly in conversation with the same tradition: the sardonic young woman who sees through social performance, the specific grief of a place that used to mean something, the comedy that keeps barely covering a real dread. If Enid had grown up in Possum Springs, she would understand.