But like his "Ghost World" before it, Clowes' latest comic is about the fragile nature of childhood friendships.

"There's a certain sadness about them," Clowes says in a phone interview. "Because I think that most of us never have friendships like that ever again. Having that one friend, where it's the two of you against the world in high school, is a very intense thing. As you get older, you tend not to allow that to happen to yourself ever again, or you just don't have the room for it in your life anymore. So there's something much more interesting about those younger friendships, but they almost never last. You can't really move on if you're stuck in that. It's very unlikely that the two of you are going to develop simultaneously."

Clowes recently wrapped up shooting "Art School Confidential" with Terry Zwigoff, the director behind both the Oscar-nominated "Ghost World" and "Crumb," not to mention the hilarious "Bad Santa." The two have formed a mutually beneficial relationship, one that is propelling Clowes past the comics crowd and into mainstream recognition. But don't think that the ex-Berkeley, Calif., resident (suck it, Texas!) is letting that go to his head.

"I've had [producers] ask about some of my other comics," Clowes explains, "but really not in the way they would if they thought the comics were really commercial. I would have people beating down my door, in that case. The interest I get is tentative and uncertain, as if they're not sure whether these are the kind of films they really want to pursue. I think that 'American Splendor' came about through a producer who was a big comics fan; he's a guy I've known for many years and he was talking about doing that film since long before this trend emerged. 'Ghost World' was a very singular thing -- that was just Terry trying to find a book he responded to, which just happened to be 'Ghost World.' Terry's not really interested in comics, even though he gets deserved credit for being one of the guys who brought them into the mainstream. But beyond that, there has been some kind of interest here or there in my comics, but most of them will never turn into films."

"The Originals"
By Dave Gibbons
160 pages
DC Comics
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As one of the brilliant minds behind DC Comics' canonical "Watchmen," Dave Gibbons is a one-man tour de force. He's lent his pen to everyone from "Superman" and Batman to the "Matrix" and "Alien" franchises, to say nothing of collaborations he's had with giants of the industry like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Stan Lee.

But "The Originals" is one of his most personal works yet, a dystopian look back at Britain's mod explosion, a cultural movement that claimed Gibbons when he was a teenager. A meaning-laden black-and-white comic centered around the exploits of Lel, who wants more than anything to get in with the colorful mod gang known as the Originals, Gibbons' latest work explores, like Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" before it, that peculiar postwar U.K. environment that birthed everything from mod, punk and the Beatles to Maggie Thatcher's conservative revolution. But Gibbons maintains that the Burgess comparisons end there.

"What I had in mind was not to duplicate 'A Clockwork Orange' or 'Quadrophenia,'" Gibbons says. "But I guess that's one of the inevitable things if you're doing a book about disaffected youth who think they're grown up but actually aren't. Not to quote the Who or anything, but I think that my generation was really the first that didn't have to fight in a war or at least perform military service. And I think that, in some ways, joining a youth gang is a substitute for that. You clearly want to identify with a group of people, you want to have something that's not connected to the home, something that can give you your own adventures, ones that have nothing to do with your childhood environment. Certainly, I remember Britain in the '50s as being drab and gray, and it is that kind of austere backdrop that causes colorful fads to start to shine."

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