Ghost World follows the day-to-day lives of best friends Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, two cynical, pseudo-intellectual, and intermittently witty teenage girls recently graduated from high school at the end of the 1990s.

A darkly written comic, with intermittently sombre explorations of friendship and modern life, Ghost World has become renowned for its frank treatment of adolescence.

Ghost World takes place in an unnamed suburban town filled with shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and urban sprawl.

The phrase "Ghost World" is seen by the characters several times, painted or graffitied on garage doors, signs, and billboards for an undeclared reason.

The Village Voice stated that "Clowes spells out the realities of teen angst as powerfully and authentically as Salinger did in Catcher in the Rye for an earlier generation".

[citation needed] Enid Coleslaw (her father had their surname legally changed from "Cohn" before she was born) and Rebecca (Becky) Doppelmeyer are two cynical, intelligent teenage girls who are best friends in the 1990s.

They have recently graduated from high school and spend their days wandering around their unnamed town criticizing pop culture and the people they encounter while wondering what they are going to do with the rest of their lives.

They also have a quiet friend named Josh; throughout the book the two girls enjoy teasing him, but they are also attracted to him and eventually a romantic triangle forms.

Enid takes an interest in playing pranks on other people, purely for her own benefit, especially a classmate named Josh who she attempts to seduce.

Clowes said of Enid's character: "When I started out I thought of her as this id creature... 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!

Beyond Enid and Rebecca, there are many minor and recurring characters in the comic strip: Ghost World was first conceived in the early 1990s by Daniel Clowes.

Clowes also credits as having drawn some inspiration from the film The World of Henry Orient, in which two curious young girls stalk a middle-aged man who is having an affair.

[7] In the book, Enid and Rebecca are obsessed with various strange people in the neighborhood, including "The Satanists" and a psychic named Bob Skeetes.

Clowes has said in interviews that he chose two teenage girls for his protagonists partly because he could use them to express his more cynical opinions without readers taking the characters as author surrogates.

The book was made into a 2001 movie, Ghost World, directed by Terry Zwigoff (also known for his award-winning documentary about underground cartoonist Robert Crumb).