At first, I was liking this very much less than the film (which may have had something to do with the fact that I read the first bit while balancing it in one hand and photocopying stuff with the other, buried in the bowels of the Baillieu), but I got into it more and more as it went on, and, after finishing it on the bus heading home, ended up going through the whole thing again later the same night (last night). I think that the initial response was mostly born of the fact that the characters in the graphic novel are much less attractive than their filmic representatives; much of the appeal of the film is that Enid and Rebecca are such beautiful drifters and, even allowing for the differences between graphic art and real people, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson these illustrations ain't. Perhaps even more importantly, the world as a whole is a much more washed-out place in the comic - apart from the black and white of the line drawings, the only colour is a sort of pale unvarying turquoise, giving proceedings an air of perpetual twilight.
But - let's face it - the comic is far more true to life. The Enid of the comics isn't unbearably cool, and its Rebecca isn't impossibly gamine and doe-like, but really, neither are people who act and talk like this in 'real life', just as lives such as these aren't lived in vivid daubs of technicolour and intangible sparkle. And there's something about the comics that makes me want to read them over and over despite the unprettiness - a lot seems to take place between the panels, and the disjointedness of some of the transitions is apt to the floating 'ghost world' Clowes renders. They may be grittier than the film, and consequently have evoked less of a response from me, but these comics share an undefinable edge which, if anything, cuts deeper (though less personally profoundly) than their cinematic adaptation.
