Here: 05/21/25

Here by Richard McGuire (2014) began as a shorter comic in 1989. In six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it overlapped time to tell the story of a very specific space and its inhabitants between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2313 AD. This book takes that initial comic and expands it to 304 pages.

This graphic novel was recommended by Philip Nel in How to Draw the World (2024). In both McGuire's book and Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon, the world is built up through a series of drawings that maintain the same perspective but still convey a wider space and a passing of time.

While reading the description of this graphic novel in Nel's book I wasn't sure how to visualize the method of story telling. After a few pages, though, I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of overlaying pieces of what could be construed as larger panels to create a decoupage account of a specific location as thematic things reoccur over the years or even eras.

At a deeper level, I had an almost visceral reaction to this book because of a very personal experience. To me these overlaid panels remind me of scanning slides.

I have purchased some bulk boxes of slides off eBay. The largest one I'm working on, a set of approximately 2500 slides, has three distinct collections mixed together. It's only through seeing both the same people but their spaces over different years that I'm able to separate out the three collections and to understand these three different stories. McGuire's artwork serves as a collage representation of what looking at old slides is like.

Here with it's exploration of time and space sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. If we take the far future as the "present," those visitors to the marshy area that once had the house where most of the action takes place, could be seen as privileged (00) travelers. Their destination is uhoria (CC), or the different times of the location they are visiting and experiencing through the multimedia presentation. Their route there is the cornfield, or in this case, tkaronto (FF).

Five stars

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