Ghost World is a 2001 comedy-drama film directed by Terry Zwigoff, based on the comic book of the same name and screenplay by Daniel Clowes. The story focuses on the life of two teenage friends, Enid and Rebecca, who are outside of the normal high school social order in an unnamed American city.

The film follows the lives of best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) during the summer after their high-school graduation. The girls are both social outcasts, but Rebecca is more popular with boys than Enid. Enid's diploma is awarded on the condition that she attend a remedial art class. Even though she is a talented artist, her art teacher, Roberta (Illeana Douglas), believes art must be socially meaningful and dismisses Enid's sketches as "light entertainment".

Shortly after graduation, the two girls see a personal ad in which a lonely man named Seymour (Steve Buscemi) asks a woman he met recently to contact him. With Becky at her side, Enid makes a prank phone call to Seymour, pretending to be the woman and inviting him to meet her at a diner, and when he goes there, the two girls secretly watch and make fun of him. However, Enid begins to feel sorry for him, so a few days later they follow him to his apartment building, where they find him selling vintage records in a garage sale. Enid buys an old blues album from him, and they gradually become friends. One of her favorite activities is trying to find women for him to date. Meanwhile, Enid has been attending her art class. In order to please Roberta, Enid persuades Seymour to lend her an old poster depicting a grotesquely caricatured black man, which was once used as a promotional tool by the fried-chicken franchise where Seymour holds a middle management position. In class, she presents the poster as a social comment about racism, and Roberta is so impressed with the concept that she later offers Enid a scholarship to an art college.

Ghost World is a comic book written and illustrated by Daniel Clowes. It was originally serialized in issues #11 through #18 (June 1993 to March 1997) of Clowes's comic book series Eightball, and was first published in book form in 1997 by Fantagraphics Books. A commercial and critical success, it was very popular with teenage audiences on its initial release and developed into a cult classic. The book has been reprinted in multiple editions and was the basis for the 2001 feature film of the same name.

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 in the early 1990s. They spend their days wandering aimlessly around their unnamed American town, criticizing popular culture and the people they encounter while wondering what they will do for the rest of their days. As the comic progresses and Enid and Rebecca make the transition into adulthood, the two develop tensions and drift apart.

Daniel Gillespie Clowes (born April 14, 1961 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American author, screenwriter and cartoonist of alternative comic books.

Much of Clowes's work first appeared in his anthology comic Eightball, which featured self-contained serialized narratives. All of the serialized narratives have been collected and published as graphic novels, most notably Ghost World. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted Ghost World into the 2001 film of the same name, and he also adapted another Eightball story into the 2006 film Art School Confidential.

In 1979, Clowes finished high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. After earning his BFA, he unsuccessfully attempted to find work in New York as an illustrator. From 1985 to 1989 he contributed both art and stories to Cracked magazine, working extensively on a feature called "The Uggly Family."

In 1985, Clowes wrote his first Lloyd Llewellyn story, which he sent to Fantagraphics' Gary Groth, and his work soon appeared in issue 13 of the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets. Lloyd Llewellyn became a comic book series; the six regular issues, published in 1986 and 1987, were followed by a special, The All-New Lloyd Llewellyn in Black and White, in 1988.

Thora Birch (born March 11, 1982) is an American actress. She was a child actor in the 1990s, starring in movies such as All I Want for Christmas (1991), Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993), Monkey Trouble (1994), Now and Then (1995), and Alaska (1996). She came to prominence in 1999 after earning worldwide attention and praise for her performance in American Beauty. She then starred in the well received film Ghost World (2001), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Birch was born in Los Angeles, California, the eldest child of Jack Birch and Carol Connors. Her parents, who were her business managers from the start, are former adult film actors and both appeared in the pornographic film Deep Throat. Birch is of German Jewish, Nordic, and Italian ancestry . The family's original surname was Biersch, coming from her German Jewish ancestors. Her name Thora is derived from the name of the Norse God of thunder and lightning, Thor. She has a younger brother, Bolt.

Due to their own experience with acting, Birch's parents were reticent to encourage her in the profession, but were persuaded to show her photograph to agents by a babysitter who noticed her imitating commercials. She landed several parts in the late '80s, including advertisements for Burger King, California Raisins, Quaker Oats, and Vlasic Pickles. Her first acting job followed.