Here
by Richard McGuire
2014
Here is a very strange, nonlinear graphic novel. Each two-page spread is a single large panel that depicts the same spot in space at a different moment in time. Most of these panels take place in the 20th century, when there's a house there, with one corner of the living room exactly lining up with the spine of the book and the edge between the two pages. In most spreads, there are additional, smaller panels stacked atop the background, showing different moments.
There's no direct interaction between the moments - if we see a phone ringing in 1957 and someone saying "hello" in 2014, it's a juxtaposition of two moments that look interesting beside each other, not someone hearing and answering a phone that rang decades earlier. The effect is like a collage - moments that do not coincide are placed in conversation. There's not really anything else quite like this that I can point to, to tell you that Here is like it. Reading the book feels like listening to music. I felt I could almost hear the soundtrack in my head.
There's no direct interaction between the moments - if we see a phone ringing in 1957 and someone saying "hello" in 2014, it's a juxtaposition of two moments that look interesting beside each other, not someone hearing and answering a phone that rang decades earlier. The effect is like a collage - moments that do not coincide are placed in conversation. There's not really anything else quite like this that I can point to, to tell you that Here is like it. Reading the book feels like listening to music. I felt I could almost hear the soundtrack in my head.
Richard McGuire wrote the first version of Here in 1989. It was 6 pages long. The newer, expanded version is just over 300 pages, and was published in 2014. I found out about it from an excerpt in The Best American Comics 2016, which I read last year. Last year also, Here got adapted as a Tom Hanks movie, which is almost unimaginable to me. I have to think that either the film is very different from the comic, or else audiences expecting a typical narrative film were in for quite a surprise! (After seeing her in The Congress, Robin Wright fans ought to be more used to this sort of thing.)
There is no narrative here, not really, just moments playing off each other, like visual jazz. Even within this set-up McGuire plays around with pace and time. As you turn the pages, you might get sequential moments that are like the panels in a conventional comic, or like a flipbook showing a somersault in slow motion. A few times, you get a dozen moments all on one page, as when the original builder constructs the house, or when a bird flies in through an open window. Very often, the background is a different time from any of the moments of activity.
Most of the moments show the inhabitants of the house between the 1950s and 2014. But we see the history of the land from millions of years in the past, through every century since the 1400s, and into the future. These aren't shown at all chronologically, but we do get more past in the first half of the book, and the future doesn't show up until the final third. McGuire's omniscience shows us a catastrophic flood in the 2100s, and a tour group on a boardwalk atop wetlands in the 2200s.
Aside from the family who lives in the house, we also see two Natives having a tryst in the woods in the 1600s, Ben Franklin fighting with his son in a house that's visible in the distance in the 1700s, an Impressionist painter and his girlfriend picnicking in the field in the 1800s. We see multiple juxtaposed Christmases, pages of overlapping Halloweens. We see people telling jokes and stories, arguing and fighting, mothers holding babies, people sleeping on the floor or the couch. We see a number of spectacular sunsets.
Although the art style and storytelling techniques are totally different, Here reminded me a bit of Building Stories, which also covers a fair swath of time, and centers on only a few locations. Here is much weirder and more experimental, less like an epic narrative and more like a dance performance. It's hard to even judge how effective it is, because there's no other thing that uses the same techniques to serve as a comparison. But I'm glad I read it.
There is no narrative here, not really, just moments playing off each other, like visual jazz. Even within this set-up McGuire plays around with pace and time. As you turn the pages, you might get sequential moments that are like the panels in a conventional comic, or like a flipbook showing a somersault in slow motion. A few times, you get a dozen moments all on one page, as when the original builder constructs the house, or when a bird flies in through an open window. Very often, the background is a different time from any of the moments of activity.
Most of the moments show the inhabitants of the house between the 1950s and 2014. But we see the history of the land from millions of years in the past, through every century since the 1400s, and into the future. These aren't shown at all chronologically, but we do get more past in the first half of the book, and the future doesn't show up until the final third. McGuire's omniscience shows us a catastrophic flood in the 2100s, and a tour group on a boardwalk atop wetlands in the 2200s.
Aside from the family who lives in the house, we also see two Natives having a tryst in the woods in the 1600s, Ben Franklin fighting with his son in a house that's visible in the distance in the 1700s, an Impressionist painter and his girlfriend picnicking in the field in the 1800s. We see multiple juxtaposed Christmases, pages of overlapping Halloweens. We see people telling jokes and stories, arguing and fighting, mothers holding babies, people sleeping on the floor or the couch. We see a number of spectacular sunsets.
Although the art style and storytelling techniques are totally different, Here reminded me a bit of Building Stories, which also covers a fair swath of time, and centers on only a few locations. Here is much weirder and more experimental, less like an epic narrative and more like a dance performance. It's hard to even judge how effective it is, because there's no other thing that uses the same techniques to serve as a comparison. But I'm glad I read it.
