It took Clowes and Zwigoff years to get enough money to make "Ghost World" right. Raising the money and finding someone to finance their vision were "an ordeal, such a chore." There were years of sitting by the phone every day, of big meetings at which someone would say, "I love it! You have to change this and this and this." "Ghost World" was paraded by every studio in town before an acceptable deal was made.

On the bright side was working with Zwigoff, which Clowes says was what it must have been like to work with hands-on, visionary directors such as Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick. "He was not so much a writer as the guy I had to please. So I would write all this stuff and he would say, 'I like this, I don't like this.' It was all sort of filtered through him. It's very much his work. We had a blast working together."

Clowes wrote "David Boring," his newest graphic novel, while he was working on the "Ghost World" movie. The book traces the operatic final months of a tortured 19-year-old security guard turned screenwriter who meets the girl of his dreams (she had a precursor, of course, a Nabokovian forbidden cousin in childhood) only to lose her to a cult. His quiet life gets progressively weirder, and after a variety of bizarre twists and gunshot wounds Boring winds up stranded on an island with his cousin as the world comes -- or does it? -- to an unclimactic end.

"I wanted the story to end with an explosion of happiness that was ultimately really depressing -- which is hard to do," says Clowes about his bittersweet ending.

"Stories come from whatever your psychological state is at the time of writing. A lot of it came from my situation of working on this movie. There's a lot of subtext about movies throughout the whole thing. I was working on 'Ghost World' with this female producer [Lianne Halfon] and Terry [Zwigoff], and we had this sort of family dynamic going the whole time. I was the son who was both the gifted genius and the ignored nobody. And I realized this producer was extremely hard to please. We'd do our best work and she'd find something wrong with it. And that all started coming out in these characters -- David's mother and distant father."

Boring is one of the few major Clowes characters who doesn't represent part of himself. "I was actually trying to create a character thinking, 'What if I had a kid? What if I had a son and he turned out to be like these horrible kids in Berkeley that I see every day -- these pot-smoking and skateboarding guys who listen to bad music?' I started thinking, 'God, I'd be so embarrassed! That would really be painful for me.' I thought, 'What kind of son would I like to have? Who would be a guy I would actually like?'"

Clowes was also thinking about the process of creating comics. "It's like these characters come alive from a kind of marriage between the cartoonist and the reader. And this merging of them is what created the character David Boring." He invented for David a mysterious, God-like cartoonist father and a cold, disapproving mother -- "sort of a stand-in for how I view the audience, as this cold, disapproving outside entity," he laughs.

The aesthetic that runs throughout Clowes' work seems to borrow heavily from a dim Chandler-esque vision of '50s urban decay and despair. The look has been described as "noir," but Clowes, who grew up on Chicago's South Side, says, "I grew up in a very urban neighborhood that had absolutely no qualities of suburbia, so I think my frame of reference was decaying old buildings and water towers, and it just all seeped into my consciousness. When I started drawing comics, and I thought about where a person would be walking around, it was like, 'Oh, a horrible-looking, graffiti-covered alley!' As a result, it seems like I'm trying to go for some kind of film noir look, but it's really just the world I'm familiar with." Even living in Berkeley -- which to Clowes is absolute suburbia -- for the past eight years hasn't influenced his vision. "When I close my eyes," he says, "I still see Chicago."

Clowes was born in Chicago in 1961, and his childhood was "perfect if you want your child to grow up to be a cartoonist." He was a "shy, loner, bookworm kind of kid" who liked to sit in his room and do comics. His parents, an auto mechanic and a steel-mill worker ("who made things in the basement in his spare time, including, for five years, stuff from the unassembled parts of an airplane -- the wings and part of the fuselage -- and a harpsichord"), divorced about a year after he was born. His father now makes furniture on commission, while his mother, who is 70, attends law school in Chicago.

"I remember never having got what had happened, and never having a sense of my parents' ever having been together. It was just this big mystery; nobody ever talked about it."

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