There has always been a feeling of jittery unease underscoring Clowes' work, but in "Ghost World," the sense of dread and horror emanates more from the real world than from the supernatural one. The creepy disquiet of "Ghost World" is nourished by television, suburbia and the soul-sucking banality of both. The serial's panels are cast in the eerie blue light of the television -- which is always on, always talking, never saying anything.

"Ghost World" is the melancholy story of the tail end of a friendship between two alienated teenage girls, Enid Coleslaw (her name is an anagram of "Daniel Clowes") and Becky Doppelmeyer, who live in a strip-mall-studded, palm-tree-lined, undifferentiated world of fake '50s diners and existential pain. Whatever hurt they don't experience themselves, they cruelly inflict on others. Enid, in particular, does not suffer America quietly. She mercilessly baits and humiliates the disenfranchised and disappointed adults she sees all around her while narrowing her world of acceptable people to two.

Clowes doesn't even exempt himself from the ranks of creepy adults who seem to exist only to let down Enid and Becky. In one episode, when Becky accuses Enid of being a man hater, Enid defends herself by claiming that her ideal relationship would be with the "famous cartoonist David Clowes." Yet when she shows up at a comic book store where he's scheduled to make an appearance, she finds a vaguely creepy guy sitting alone at a table in the back of the room, hiding behind a stack of comics.

"I felt I had given myself a privileged position to eavesdrop on her world, and it was only fair that she should hold me to the same scrutiny that she does everyone else," says Clowes on why he chose to make himself repulsive to his favorite character. Disappointed, Enid takes off without meeting him.

Clowes' knack for capturing this particular brand of arty teen-girl angst was so uncanny that he has since been accused of following young girls around and spying on them with a tape recorder. But like most of his characters -- some of whom make no bones about being just "another transparent D. Clowes stand-in" -- Enid is a fully realized character whose struggle to define herself and understand the seemingly unreal world around her reflects her creator's main preoccupations. As Enid embarks on the painful quest to become her adult self, she leaves the more passive Becky behind.

"When I started out I thought of her as this id creature -- totally outgoing, follows her impulses. Then I realized halfway through that she was just more vocal than I was, but she has the same kind of confusion, self-doubts and identity issues that I still have -- even though she's 18 and I'm 39!"

In "Ghost World," Clowes captures the way real teenagers simultaneously devour and reject the bogus images of themselves produced by the media. In the first episode, Enid chastises Becky for reading Sassy magazine, which is staffed by "trendy, stuck-up, prep-school bitches who think they're 'cutting edge' because they know who Sonic Youth is." At the end of the episode, Enid is kicking back on her bed, flipping through the magazine's glossy pages and muttering, "God, look at these stupid cunts." ("She loves it," says Clowes of Enid's closet Sassy obsession. "She can't stop reading, but she hates it.")

Clowes had problems with Sassy too. The magazine once swiped a frame from "Eightball," used it as an illustration and never paid him for it, despite his polite requests. So by the time he began work on "Ghost World," he was a man with a mission: "I want to create two girls who are much cooler than anything in Sassy, and who will make people not like Sassy." Ironically, Clowes' own experiences in Hollywood dispelled any notions he may have had about the movie industry being any more clued in to the way teenage girls think than the magazine world is. Even Clowes, a professional cynic, was taken aback by the sheer weight of the institutional mediocrity and lack of insight that daily threaten to crush any and all fresh ideas that manage to crawl into its sight.

"The things that happened were all the things you would think of. You think the fiction of Hollywood has to be exaggerated, and it's just not. I was shocked. I always thought there were really smart people working in Hollywood who were just really cynical, and they knew that the movies they were making were not that good, and they were doing it because they tested well. But mostly it's a very middlebrow to lowbrow kind of town. And they're making films that they approve of.

"It's also a very parochial world. If you have any sort of outsider's vision at all -- and I consider 'Ghost World' to be just a hair outside something that anybody could understand; this is not exactly a Samuel Beckett play -- they treat it like you are turning in 'Gummo' or 'Last Year at Marienbad.' They treated 'Ghost World' like it was this outrageous art film that nobody would get. And it's just a coming-of-age story that's only slightly different than what they're used to. They would say, 'Oh, it's great, we'll get Jennifer Love Hewitt.' And we'd think, 'Wait, that's what this is opposed to!' I'm sure she's a nice person and everything, but she's got the opposite personality than these girls have! And they would say, 'Oh. I thought she was supposed to be really pretty.'"

Brilliant Careers: Sound and Vision Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles