Richard McGuire's Here: A Satire of Human Importance

Introduction: Space as Character

Richard McGuire's Here is a quiet graphic novel that imagines the same physical place at 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 during an era before human civilization even existed; the next shows it 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 depending on the viewer's gaze. Humanity's place in space — on this earth — is de-centered, as human stories do not even take precedence. Here does not tell a story so much as it calls upon the viewer to think more deeply about his or her own place in history.

Origins and Evolution of Here

Chris Ware, writing in 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 top-to-bottom and right-to-left reading that characterized most comic book writing. Although McGuire's comic began its life 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.

The Viewer, the Space, and the Illusion of Character

While this shuffling feature allows for an entertaining and more interactive experience made possible by modern technology, it once again reduces the importance of the characters relative to 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). The interactive format even paradoxically de-centers the cartoonist, as the viewer gains control over the images — even while the space speaks to each viewer in unique, distinctive ways. Arguably, the main character is not any human being but rather "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 falls within the very same place. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that there is no main character other than the viewer, who controls how he or she perceives these images. The idea of character is itself an illusion, given how things are constantly changing.

Conclusion: The Unstable Here

To fully appreciate Here — even while projecting one's own ideas into the panels — the viewer must also understand how the physical "here" that he or she inhabits in real life is just as unstable. McGuire's work ultimately invites each viewer to reckon with their own transience, situating individual human experience within an incomprehensibly vast continuum of time and space. In doing so, Here quietly but powerfully challenges the self-importance that underlies so much of how human beings understand their place in the world.

Works Cited

Greenberg, Julia. "5 Reasons to Read the Time-Traveling Graphic Novel Here." Wired, 9 December 2014. https://www.wired.com/2014/12/here-graphic-novel-richard-mcguire/

Here. Screendiver. https://screendiver.com/directory/here-by-richard-mcguire/

McGuire, Richard. Here. Pantheon, 2020.

Ware, Christopher. "Chris Ware on Here — A Game-Changing Graphic Novel." The Guardian, 17 December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel