The series was a major departure for Clowes, who had previously populated Eightball with considerably more outlandish material. 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. Artwork and illustration Clowes has said he chose the pale blue coloring for the story because he wanted to reflect the experience of walking home in the twilight, when every house has a television on and the living rooms are bathed in a ghostly blue light. Differences between the comic book version and the graphic novel Clowes made various changes to the artwork between the original issues and the book collection, such as changing Becky's face early in the story so it more closely matches her appearance at the end. The comics as they originally appeared in Eightball employed only two colors; the early chapters were in black and dark blue, then black and a lighter shade of blue later on, and black and light green for the final two chapters. The graphic novel reprint uses this light green and black color scheme throughout. There is one inadvertent exception: in Eightball #16, a printing error led to the entire chapter being published in an orange tone instead of a blue one. "No one quite knows how or why this happened," wrote Clowes in The Complete Eightball, a 2015 compilation of the comic that faithfully reproduces the mistake. The character design also changed significantly during the original run of the story, with characters' faces becoming cleaner and less detailed, indicative of a shift in Clowes's changing aesthetic in all his comics, eschewing the minute facial details that had long been one of his trademarks, for more simplified designs. The character of John Ellis, for example, had significant shading and cross-hatching on his face in the original comics, where in the book he has a simpler, uncluttered design. Another striking example is a panel on the second page of the first chapter that shows Rebecca reading a magazine. In the original comic, her eyes and chin are shaded in, her hair reaches her shoulders, and she appears to be scowling. In the graphic novel, this panel was redrawn, softening and lightening Rebecca's features. Enid's appearance was also reworked in this panel, and in several others in the first chapter of