An argumentative essay of Richard McGuires Here
Here by Richard McGuire: A Satire of Humanitys Importance
Richard McGuires 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 viewers gaze. Humanitys 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 McGuires 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
Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic...…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, its 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 ones own ideas into the panels, the viewer must also understand how the physical here which the viewer inhabits…
