A recent Daniel Clowes cartoon in the New Yorker closed with this punch line: “I mean, think about it—we’re just these weird organisms on a rock in space!” The joke is part paranoia, part truth—the worldview that drives his oddball characters. Clowes is a trenchant observer, and he consistently turns that which is most familiar—the human life-form—into something otherworldly and frequently repellent.

But as his more recent endeavors have shown, the cartoonist has, by his own account, softened a bit toward his characters. In 2007 and 2008, Clowes created Mister Wonderful, a weekly strip that ran in the New York Times Magazine. In deciding the fate of Marshall, its hapless hero, he confesses, “I couldn’t do anything bad to this poor guy.” In the special edition of Ghost World, published by Fantagraphics in 2008 to mark the tenth anniversary of the original hardcover edition, Clowes admits that in re-reading the book, he expected to feel an authorial distance from the heroines’ travails; instead, he experienced an affectionate sympathy. He also observes that Enid and Rebecca’s story has taken on a life of its own, and in so doing has caused the author to “question [his] own existence.”