The average feature-film script weighs in at 100 pages - one per minute of the final movie - and comes chock-a-block with dialogue, explanations, hints of what kind of film it might make if only it winds up in the hands of the right director. What a script can't tell you is what a film will look like, feel like. At some point in the process, a storyboard artist might come in to help sketch out the eventual visuals. So why not dispense with scripts and storyboards altogether, and simply have all films written in the form of comic strips?
This method should work a treat, on the evidence of Ghost World, a collection of strips - a graphic novel, if you must - by American artist Daniel Clowes. Ghost World, a rich, complex feature film in its own right, is soon to be released as an actual movie, starring Thora Birch, from American Beauty, and Steve Buscemi. The director is Terry Zwigoff, who made Crumb, the extraordinary documentary portrait of cartoonist Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional family. Zwigoff is an unknown quantity when it comes to fiction, but judging by Crumb, he'll be more than capable of handling Ghost World's subtleties (yes, in a comic book). Clowes and Zwigoff collaborated on the screenplay, but I wonder how much it resembles a conventional script - I'd like to think Clowes at least drew a few faces in the margins.
Clowes, a versatile master of comic-art pastiche, used to be known as a pop surrealist. His first hit series featured jazzily executed beatnik hero Lloyd Llewellyn; then his own regular title Eightball launched a labyrinthine straight-from-the-id serial called Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, so nightmarish that it made Twin Peaks look like a Merchant-Ivory number. But in his realist mode, Clowes is a sensitive observer of character and culture - his one-off strip Caricature, about a middle-aged hack caricaturist falling for a hip, callow admirer, is as insightful and emotionally rich as the best American short stories.
Ghost World is in Clowes's realist vein. Its stars are Enid and Rebecca, teenage small-town girls who hang out, waste time, laugh, lapse into gloom. They spend a summer indulging their snootily ironic tastes - sniggering at lame TV comedians, frequenting "the Mona Lisa of the bad, fake diners", analysing the Freudian language of cookie packaging. They think they're smarter than their peers, and pretty much are, but occasionally their assurance takes a blow: they gradually accumulate guilt at the heartless prank phone calls they make. They're not smart, adorable kids, but self-absorbed, cynical, sentimental, appallingly patronising towards the old and the ugly. But you can't help loving them.
Clowes is brilliant at the precociously jaded, know-it-all cadences of teenage dialogue, but he does as much with looks as with words. Bespectacled, nerd-chic Enid goes through endless fashion hoops trying to define herself, as her hair switches from spiky green to bobbed black, and she swaps her trapper's cap for a ludicrous bat-eared mask from the local sex shop. Subtle facial expressions count for everything - a grossed-out twist of the lip, or the melancholic blankness on Enid's face after she loses her virginity. Grotesques cross the girls' path, but the real freaks are the stereotypes who think they're classy outsiders - repellent grinners like the editor of an outrage fanzine, or the ex-punk turned "big-ass corporate fuck" who thinks he's screwing the system.
Ghost World's eloquent shifts prove that comics can create mood with perfect economy. The best in-joke has Enid fantasising about famous comics artist "David Clowes", whom she imagines as a tough-jawed intellectual. In the final frame on page 29, Enid sees the real Daniel Clowes, looking excruciatingly geeky; in the first frame on page 30, she's sitting disconsolate over her soda. Most films would spell out that emotional transition: Clowes does it in the turn of a page. The saga's conclusion says volumes about leaving youth and home behind, but everything is implied in the elimination of dialogue and in the subtle change of Enid's physique and wardrobe, even the bag she's carrying. Clowes, like several other comics artists, could teach film-makers the futility of overstatement.
The Ghost World film seems to be in good hands, but you can't help having your fears, and Clowes must have had them too. When he wound up the Velvet Fist series in Eightball, he followed it up with an epilogue in which Hollywood buys the strip and mangles it beyond recognition. The final frame has a character watching the movie on TV and talking about the cartoonist who wrote it: "He got a lot of money from the movie and became a cocaine addict and then he got into heavy debt with the mob and now he's a born-again Christian." Fingers crossed, then.
Ghost World is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £6.99.
