Here and Human Impermanence

An argumentative essay of Richard McGuire’s “Here”

Here by Richard McGuire: A Satire of Humanity’s Importance

Richard McGuire’s Here is a quiet graphic novel, which imagines the same place in different points in time. By disconnecting place from a linear narrative or specific characters, the space itself becomes a character. One panel can depict the same space in time during an era before human civilization even existed; the next in the 1700s, then in the 1970s. Other panels depict the space from different angles, rendering the image of a sofa or a table completely different from the viewer’s gaze. Humanity’s place in space, on this earth, is de-centered as human stories do not even matter. Here does not tell a story as much as it calls upon the viewer to think more deeply about his or her own place in history.

Chris Ware of The Guardian describes the first, 1989 appearance of Here as a printed text in the experimental comic journal RAW as mind-blowing for him as a young artist. Its design challenged the then-confining structure of up and down and right to left which characterized most of comic book writing. Although McGuire’s comic began its conception in a traditional print magazine, it has undergone many revisions and additions since. The current eBook version of Here allows the reader to shuffle the panels in different combinations.

While this allows for an entertaining and more interactive experience now allowed by technology, once again this reduces the importance of the characters versus the space and location itself. “Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic toy that resembles the same dinosaur in the year 1999” (Here). It even paradoxically de-centers the cartoonist itself, as the viewer gains control over the images, even while the space speaks to each viewer in unique, distinctive ways. Arguably, while the main character is not any human being but rather is “the space of the room, the arbitrary geometry imposed by a human mind on a space for reasons of shelter and as a background,” while the main character is also the gazer, or “your consciousness where everything is pieced together and tries to find, and to understand, itself” (Ware).

Native Americans, colonists, dinosaurs, suburbanites, homes, and various flora and fauna populate the pages of Here. The comic also questions not only how time is measured but the ways in which people value life itself. Someone in one panel who is very much alive can be dead or nonexistent, depending on where the next moment in time exists in the very same place. On the other hand, it is possible to argue the sense that there is no main character, other than the viewer who is in control of how he or she perceives these images. The idea of character is itself an illusion, given how things are constantly changing.

After all, McGuire as an artist is selecting these images. His choice of dinosaurs making the mundane concerns of human beings seem transient and acting as a harbinger of how our own species may be extinct at some point seems very much a clear choice. The focus on Native American life in nature, versus modern, human life enclosed in houses is a very pointed statement about how America is located upon colonized and how unnatural our lives today can be, in contrast to the past, where people lived more harmoniously with nature.

On its surface, Here appears to just be recording or reporting life, but the choices McGuire makes are very deliberate. But the ways in which the material is presented, and its unconventional way of depicting space, makes this perspective very subtle, and the satire of modern life and its preoccupations fall to the background. McGuire himself has said that the comic was inspired by his own life, and a family ritual of taking an annual photo of him in the same place of his house, year by year. Ultimately, however, if he could sum up the comic in one word, “it’s about impermanence” (Greenberg). His childhood in New Jersey, a very suburban location which was once populated by Founding Fathers and Native Americans (Greenberg). Here was an intensely personal project for the author, but especially in its new, interactive format, it can be an equally personal experience for the viewer, but all the while making its argument for the impermanence and smallness of a single human life in the greater history of the world. Instead, to fully appreciate Here, even while projecting one’s own ideas into the panels, the viewer must also understand how the physical here which the viewer inhabits in real life is just as unstable.