I pride myself on my geekness. I can name pretty much every comics character ever, have picked apart obscure historical events for hours (did President Harding really die of heart failure? Or was he murdered?) and adore small art films.
And yet, I do not understand Ghost World.
I have tried. I have. Heck, this was the book that was called “a revelation about adolescence that is both subtle and coolly beautiful” and “evocative.” I should get this. It should speak to me.
I liked Fun House. Loved Persepolis (although I liked Part1 better than Part 2), and I am very fond of Adrian Tomine’s ultra-realist series Optic Nerve.
But I just…don’t get it. At all. It’s not bad, it just doesn’t seem like much to me. The ending confuses me. While I can relate to the “problem” (if you want to call it that) I can’t figure out what it all means or why all the events are there or how everything connects.
Maybe in two or three years I try it again. But for right now I’ll let this one remind me that for now at least I haven’t accessed the highbrow comics.
Who cares about accessing high brow comics? Read what you like and enjoy it. Just because some snob says it’s good doesn’t mean that it is.
True–its just that so many people (including my English professor, whom I really respect) have found so much meaning in this book, and it seems like it should be so applicable to me at this point in my life that I feel like there’s some great secret I haven’t unlocked. Again, it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn’t find relevancy in it.
Maybe it was just a bad comic. They exist, and people call them brilliant.
True. I still hate Jane Austen, as well.
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