Richard McGuire, Here. Hamish Hamilton, 2014.
www.richard-mcguire.com/
From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision. Richard McGuire’s Here is the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
Which isn’t to say that formalist experimentation can’t occasionally produce absolute total genius. Richard McGuire‘s earliest fame came as bassist for early 80’s minimalist funk band Liquid Liquid, authors of “Cavern” (or “White Lines,” more or less), and who apparently just played a reunion show. But he also fell in with Art Spiegelman and the RAW anthology crowd and drew comics. And one of those, “Here,” from RAW 2.1, is a concentrated masterpiece.
“Here” is six pages long, drawn in a clean, neutral, almost nostalgic style. Its main construct is that each panel portrays the exact same location and space at different, marked times, non-linearly. The space mostly a corner of a living room, of a house built in 1902. A family moves in, a child is born, he grows up and continues to live in the house, he leaves and another family moves in, the house burns down. McGuire subdivides each panel into multiple time periods, so that the bottom left quarter of the corner can portray 1948, and the rest portray 2032, with an inset in the middle from 1968.
The device is so overwhelming that McGuire keeps the story as neutral as the artwork. Some of the juxtapositions make simple points (kid in 1955 says “Who’s a chicken!”; rest of panel shows chickens in a pen in 1870) and get out of the way; others seem to be assembled through pure intuition. Perhaps McGuire sought a neutral tone to mirror the implacability of the passage of time, which, unsurprisingly, weighs heavily here. But that pathos still dwarfed by the pure elegance of the structure itself; the impact is sublimely aesthetic above all else. The achievement of “Here” beneath that is to take material that normally could only be treated in highly subjective fashion and decontextualize it without producing alienation. (The base material is so traditional, down to the retro-futuristic fashions in the 2020’s.) It’s a strange, unsettling effect, numbing but not unpleasant.
McGuire was rumored to be expanding “Here” to book length. I’m not sure how it could be done, since the six pages succeed through rejecting traditional notions of “depth.” But the thing is seminal and deserves to be reprinted.- David Auerbach
Pantheon
Here, which appeared in RAW, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s avant-garde comics journal, presents time as its protagonist. Set in one corner of an anonymous living room, starting in 1957, multiple frames appear in each main panel that intermittently shift vantage point from distant past to far-off future. Like the unforgettable scenes in the 1960 film The Time Machine, where Rod Taylor experiences the passage of time as his contraption accelerates into the future, McGuire’s characters are born, age, disappear, and reappear. Events taking place in the space of the room from eons, centuries, years, and moments of now and then are united through artfully constructed pictures and terse running dialog.
In 1989, just prior to the mass popularity of graphic novels, Here offered another dimension of narrative complexity that comics artist Chris Ware cites as one of his influences. Here is, furthermore, a meditation on “impermanence,” which is what makes it emotionally compelling yet unsettling—as though every moment in time is preserved in some random playback mode. Structurally, everything and everyone has what McGuire calls a “walk-on part” as the mysterious scenes go flowing by.
McGuire (born 1957) is a veteran cartoonist, musician, toy designer, author, and illustrator of children’s books, including Night Becomes Day, Orange Book, and What’s Wrong With This Book. He's also a frequent illustrator for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Originally, Here was just one of his explorations that was put to the side. But around 15 years ago he realized “the idea was worthy, and that I could go deeper. I pitched the idea to [publishing house] Pantheon, and signed a contract, but it just didn't come together, so I put it in the drawer.” In the meantime, he received an offer to direct a segment in the feature animated film, Fear(s) of the Dark (2007), “so I jumped ship” and stopped all work on Here for a few years.
When both his parents took ill and needed his care, he returned to the U.S. “My parents were still living in the house where I grew up, which is kind of the center of Here,” he says. Then a few years after they had both passed away, McGuire was awarded The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library, which gave him the time and resources to get focused on the project again.
In 2011 Joel Smith, a curator and the head of the photography department at the Morgan, put the original Here strip in an exhibition called “The Life and Death of Buildings” at the Princeton Museum, a show of mostly photographs. “[Smith] once mentioned that it would be nice to do a show when I finished the book, a 'making of' exhibition,” Mcguire says, referring to what is now the exhibition at the Morgan. The NYPL made a lot of the funding possible.
Each of McGuire's projects start from point zero. “I don’t feel I own a particular style,” he says. “When I made the original strip it was in a very generic style, because it was the correct solution for the story. It had to be as easy to read as an instruction manual, so the reader could follow what was happening very clearly when the interlaced time panels start being introduced. Going back into the project again was tricky. I felt it had to be similar to the original version but in a new way. I didn’t want to mimic that first approach, I never thought I would merely be adding pages to the original. This was to be a re-invention.”
He wanted to maintain the feeling of a scrapbook or photo album. But unlike the RAW version, he added watercolors next to tight vector art done with the computer. “I didn't want it all to feel equal because days themselves never feel equal, the quality of light, the weather, different temperatures and moods are different, I wanted to suggest that,” he says.
For McGuire, the printed book is the finished art. But this unique exhibition reveals more than just the process—it speaks to his joy in how the strip holds up today. But there’s another bonus: “One thing that got me excited conceptually,” he says, “was having the exhibition in a one-room gallery that is about a book that takes place in one room.” -
I know exactly where I was: sitting on a tattered couch in the living room of my rental house in Austin, Texas, 1989. The ninth issue of the experimental comics magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, had been released, and I’d bought it at a local comics shop and brought it home to read, safe from the scrutiny of the University of Texas fine arts department. For a young student of painting with ambitions to tell serious comic-strip stories, the annual appearance of the magazine in which Spiegelman’s “Maus” was being serialised was a genuine event – like a gallery show, but exploring a medium that at that time had yet to be afforded aesthetic legitimacy.
A short story, “Here”, caught my eye. While many of the strips that defined RAW could be characterised as experimentally expressionistic or stylistically sophisticated, this one was bland and approachable, even homey. Across six black-and-white pages, it simply pictured the corner of a room from a fixed viewpoint, projecting a parade of moments, holidays, people, animals, biology, geology – everything, it seems, that defines and lends human life meaning – on to windows of space labelled by year (1971, 1957, 1999, 100,097BC). Birthdays, deaths, dinosaurs. In 36 panels, the universe.
I put the magazine down.
It was the first time I had had my mind blown. Sitting on that couch, I felt time extend infinitely backwards and forwards, with a sense of all the biggest of small moments in between. And it wasn’t just my mind: “Here” blew apart the confines of graphic narrative and expanded its universe in one incendiary flash, introducing a new dimension to visual narrative that radically departed from the traditional up-down and left-right reading of comic strips. And the structure was organic, nodding not only to the medium’s past but also hinting at its future.
So who was the artist, Richard McGuire? You may be familiar with his work from the New Yorker, to which he has contributed covers for nearly two decades, or perhaps as the creator of the animation in the film Fears of the Dark. You might even know him as the player of the infectious bass line of the song “Cavern”, which was sampled by Grandmaster Flash to create “White Lines”. But from now on, McGuire will be known as the author of the novel Here, because it’s a work of literature and art unlike any seen or read before. A book like this comes along once a decade, if not a century.
The result of 15 years of careful consideration and work, Here expands on the DNA of McGuire’s original short story over hundreds of lush, overwhelming, complex, complicated yet unpretentious pages; it’s an amalgam of vibrant hues and textures, drawing approaches, narrative lines and surfaces that feels in its totality like the first successful attempt to visually recreate the matrix of memory and human understanding of time. If the first strip was a piano sonata, this book is a symphony. Cannily nestling the corner of the eponymous room in the bound gutter of the open book, McGuire places the reader into the space of the story for a journey through all of time, from the earliest days on Earth past the time when humanity will no longer exist.
In the first few pages we move between 1957, 1942 and 2007, rendered in the fashionable pinks, greens and yellows that evoke each year. On the eighth page, however, we hop back to 1957 (McGuire’s birth year) and a woman appears, asking herself that biggest of small, unintentionally philosophical questions: “Hmm … now why did I come in here again?” Mysteriously, a tiny grey square picturing a walking cat has also appeared, opposite her, labelled “1999”. Then, turn the page: a bleak, blurry Sigmar Polke-esque watercolour of a snowy forest labelled “1623” consumes the spread, over which has been laid a reduced vertical pink frame of the same woman from 1957 and, in a tiny square opposite, the same 1999 cat, licking its paw. These two palimpsests of historical space precisely overlay not only the corner of the room that in 1623 has yet to be built, but also the same woman and cat from the previous pages. In short, all we know from our memory of the previous three spreads does not yet exist. Yet of course it does. Or will, or has.
Many fine artists would stop there. And if these first few panels were paintings, McGuire would be famous. But this is just page 10. The book has 304 pages of interconnected, overlapping storylines which are multivalent and varied, encompassing the lives of Native Americans and colonialists and moving from pre-human epochs to projected futures and species: to enumerate them would be like isolating notes from a musical composition to try to understand their emotional power. The rhymes and consonances, both visual and verbal, between pages and sections and images, compound with an intensity that is lyrical and romantic, yet also distant and dissonant. Throughout, an underlying thrum of the larger concerns of life – love, loneliness, sex, death – repeats, echoes, builds, and ultimately resolves into what is both a scientific apprehension and a poetic evocation of the mechanism that lends life its spiritual poignancy.
But who or what is the main character? Is it the man who seizes up at a joke told in the first few pages (yet dies, moments later, halfway through the book, after the reader has already ricocheted back and forth through millions of years of history)? Is it the indigenous couple, looking for a place to copulate? Is it the cat, the cat’s cradle, the elk, the builders, the partygoers, the weeping woman? You could say it’s the space of the room, the arbitrary geometry imposed by a human mind on a space for reasons of shelter and as a background to this theatre of life. But you could also claim it is the reader, your consciousness where everything is pieced together and tries to find, and to understand, itself. This is a big step forward for graphic novels, but it is so much more than that. With those first six pages in 1989, McGuire introduced a new way of making a comic strip, but with this volume in 2014, he has introduced a new way of making a book.
The scientist Edward O Wilson, in his most recent work The Meaning of Human Existence, laments that “creative artists and humanities scholars by and large have little grasp of the otherwise immense continuum of space-time on Earth, in both its living and non-living parts”. Well, jeez. I hope that someone gets him Here for Christmas. I also hope that someone gets it for you. I guarantee that you’ll remember exactly where you are, or were, when you first read it. - Chris Ware
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel
In 1989, Richard McGuire, an aspiring New York artist, drew a 36-panel comic that leapt back and forth through thousands of years of history without ever stepping outside the four walls of a suburban living room – a feat he achieved by floating frames within frames (his inspiration was Microsoft Windows, then just four years old). The comic, called Here, was published in Raw, the edgy anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and caused a stir among younger cartoonists. Chris Ware, who would go on to create the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, said McGuire’s strip came closer to capturing “real memory and experience than anything that had come before”.
A little oddly, McGuire left it to others to explore and capitalise on this new sense of possibility; in the years that followed, when graphic novels finally came into their own, he spent his time designing toys and children’s books, making animated films and drawing covers for the New Yorker. But now he’s back, with a full-length version of Here, his original idea having proved impossible to shake off – and once again, the strip is making waves. “All comics are somehow sheet music of time,” Spiegelman told the New York Times this year. “But Richard’s book is a symphony.” The New York Public Library devoted an entire season to celebrating its arrival.
It’s not difficult to see what the fuss is about. Here is an exquisitely drawn book, its restrained palette and pop style calling to mind the work of such diverse artists as Vermeer, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Richard Hamilton. To hold it is to covet it. McGuire has again miraculously concertinaed thousands of years of American life – the narrative flips back to 500BC, and forwards to 2033 – into a few dozen pages, and without ever leaving the confines of a suburban sitting room (the book’s gutter cleverly forms one of its four corners). But this time, his conceit feels so much more vital, so weighty. For all its outward beauty, the heart of Here is, by my reading, unavoidably moral, for it comes with an implicit warning about our stewardship of the planet.
At one point, a dinosaur wanders across the pages; at another, the author ponders a future apocalypse. In between, there are walk-on parts for generations of McGuire relatives (we’re in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he grew up); for Benjamin Franklin, who on the eve of the American revolution travelled to a house nearby to argue with his estranged son; and for the Lenape, the Native Americans who inhabited Delaware before the arrival of the European settlers. McGuire treats time as a hopscotch-playing child treats a pavement: he parcels it into squares, and then jumps all over it. It’s a dizzying technique, and sometimes his narrative moved so fast, I began to feel (I mean this literally) queasy. Its message, though, was never anything less than clear. Yes, we may be just a speck on the face of our planet. But even dots have responsibilities; even mere particles must be accountable to those who will follow. - Rachel Cooke
Here by Richard McGuire is ostensibly a graphic novel about a single point in space and the things that happen there over the course of several million years. For the majority of the comic's duration, the space in question is the corner of a room in a house in America – everything in the story takes place 'here'...
The comic itself actually started life 25 years ago, as a six-page black and white strip which ran in an 1989 issue of Raw magazine. Despite its brevity it was a radical piece of work and represented a real shift in ideas about how the 'form' of a comic book could lead to new ways of storytelling. McGuire's ambitious new version takes the concept on and expands it into a book.
The corner of the room remains the protagonist, however. As readers, we're taken right back to the time before the house was built, we see both its construction and destruction and are offered hundreds of snapshots of the various people who have lived there over several generations via snippets of gesture and dialogue.
With the viewpoint fixed on the corner of this one room, the angle of which nestles neatly into the spine of the book, McGuire adds other smaller frames to the pages which offer glimpses of years futher back into the past and also into the future.
For example, have a look at the image shown at the top of this post: placed over a background panel from 1964, a smaller inset panel shows 1993, which sits alongside two others from 1932 and 2014 – in each of the three sub-panels a girl is dancing.
There are moments of significance detached from larger life stories – arguments and declarations, for example – but we also see snatches of the comings and goings of the everyday.
In one spread, shown below, a large eighteenth-century house burns near to the site of where the book's own house will be built, while we also see the slightly uncomfortable climax of a joke told in 1989.
The link between each 'event' is the room (or space) itself, a point in which everything here happens; each moment becoming in effect a single element of the same story.
Narratives are bookended by expanses of primordial soup-like conditions from several millions of years ago and a post-apocalyptic future landscape.
In between, people get on with being people, they make their mark on each other's lives – and McGuire records these moments in a fascinating piece of work. - Mark Sinclair
In 1989 a black-and-white comic by Richard McGuire, modestly titled "Here," appeared in RAW
magazine. It was quickly recognized as a game-changing achievement in
graphic narrative. To mark the Fall 2014 publication of Here as an
all-new, full-color graphic novel and e-book, this exhibition explores
the (re)invention of a contemporary classic.
Though the viewpoint in Here remains fixed on one corner of a living room, time in the story is boundless and elastic. Populating the space with multiple frames of action, dating from the ancient past to the distant future, McGuire conjures narratives, dialogues, and streams of association that unite moments divided by years and centuries. The exhibition combines original drawings for the strip and the novel with source photographs, books that influenced the form and content of McGuire's invention, and collages and sketchbooks that afford glimpses into his creative process.
Richard McGuire (b. 1957) is a creator of children's books, music (as a founding member of the band Liquid Liquid), toys, and animated films. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The New York Times, among other publications.- www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/From-Here-to-Here
Though the viewpoint in Here remains fixed on one corner of a living room, time in the story is boundless and elastic. Populating the space with multiple frames of action, dating from the ancient past to the distant future, McGuire conjures narratives, dialogues, and streams of association that unite moments divided by years and centuries. The exhibition combines original drawings for the strip and the novel with source photographs, books that influenced the form and content of McGuire's invention, and collages and sketchbooks that afford glimpses into his creative process.
Richard McGuire (b. 1957) is a creator of children's books, music (as a founding member of the band Liquid Liquid), toys, and animated films. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The New York Times, among other publications.- www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/From-Here-to-Here
As
comics have grown in ambition and critical regard, many have long been
stamped with an upgraded marketing term: graphic novel. It’s a
designation some find pretentious. Daniel Clowes pointedly called his
2005 book, “Ice Haven,” a “comic-strip novel.”
Neil
Gaiman, the author of “The Sandman” comic-book series, told The Los
Angeles Times Magazine in 1995 that a well-known literary editor had
said to him, “My God, man, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels.”
Afterward, Mr. Gaiman commented, “I suddenly felt like someone who’d
been informed that she wasn’t actually a hooker, that in fact she was a
lady of the evening.”
Whatever
we should call these long-form blends of drawing and discourse, the
high shelf that contains the very best of them — Art Spiegelman’s
“Maus,” Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth,” to name three — needs to make room for another: Richard McGuire’s “Here.”
There’s
a lot of marrow in this unusual volume’s bones. It’s the story of the
corner of a single room, which does not sound at all promising. Corners
of rooms are where children are sent when they are being loathsome.
What
Mr. McGuire does with this corner, though, is moving and
mind-expanding. From this single vantage point, in painterly images, he
moves back and forth in time, like a man sifting through a box of
photographs taken from the same motionless camera.
In
this case, the box of photos goes all the way back to Earth’s
primordial moments, and rockets forward into the distant future. In
between are more mundane events, from the 1990s, say, or the 1770s, and
nearly every decade in between: games, parties, conversations, kisses,
television news broadcasts, nuzzled babies, arguments, funerals. It’s a
personal work, as well, one that’s set in Mr. McGuire’s own childhood
living room in Perth Amboy, N.J.
The
intensity of “Here” resides, to a large extent, in the way Mr. McGuire
shuffles and reshuffles his images. Eras overlap on almost every
two-page spread. A drawing from 1955, for example, will be overlaid with
two other images, like pop-up screens on a computer, from 1986 and
2050. Sometimes these images correspond and play off one another in
obvious ways. Sometimes the links are more uncanny, and take longer to
form in your mind. Sometimes links aren’t apparent at all.
“Here” is Mr. McGuire’s first graphic novel, to use that contested term. Up to now he has been best known as an illustrator of New Yorker covers, a director of animated films, a bass player in the no-wave band Liquid Liquid, a writer of children’s books, a designer of toys.
To
people who follow comics, he’s been on the watch list since 1989, when a
36-page prototype of “Here” appeared in the journal Raw. This volume
has been 25 years in the making, years in which his unfinished book has
hung over the form, reminding you of Robert Hughes’s observation that
“there is no tyranny like the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece.”
“Here”
is before us now, and it almost entirely exceeds expectation. It’s a
symphonic work about transience and loss, related in artwork that has
some of Edward Hopper’s moody, light-struck realism.
The
language in “Here” is frequently as evocative as the drawings. In one
panel, a person out of the frame notes that sometimes you find yourself
singing a song before “you realize the lyrics are the perfect commentary
on your thoughts. Your subconscious has selected them like a jukebox.”
Another
two-page spread features an apocalyptic image (water from rising seas
pouring into a window in the year 2111) next to drawings of broken items
from other years: a plate, a mirror, some wineglasses. Scattered among
the spreads are insults and imprecations (some unpublishable here) from
dates past and present: “doofus,” “dirt bag,” “geek,” “weirdo.”
This
book’s few missteps arrive in the text, however. A handful of times Mr.
McGuire leans too hard on this material. I groaned aloud when a man, in
a drawing dated 1910, says: “No one has mastered the art of life.
Everyone is just stumbling in the dark.” This sort of oversell is rare
here.
You
page through “Here” slowly; it takes time to absorb properly. Details
leap out. Mr. McGuire is a close observer of changes in interior
decoration, in dress, in stereos and television sets. (Oil paintings
over the hearth morph into Conan O’Brien on a flat screen.)
So
many artistic visions of the human future display flocks of comely
young people, as if the wrinkled would be forced underground in the
coming decades. In “Here,” we get to witness a couple of happy geezers,
in 2050, playing a futuristic game.
There
are more than a few eye-popping images in “Here.” A dinosaur lumbers
past. Ben Franklin turns up in a carriage. There are intimations of
nuclear disaster. These are not the things that stick with you about
this work, however.
“Here”
is, at heart, a compendium of small moments that chime in unexpected
ways, and that together acquire genuine depth. Mr. McGuire’s portals and
wormholes to past and future underline everything that’s fragile and
temporal about our present. He’s given us a series of little Zapruder
clips of intimate experience.
Here, a
graphic novel by Richard McGuire, tells the story of what happens in
one corner of a suburban living room. It is not an obviously thrilling
subject. Nor do the opening spreads hint that anything more exciting
will follow: the room is sparsely furnished with items of everyday
domesticity — a sofa bed, a baby’s cot, a stepladder. So far, so dull.
Very slowly, over the following pages, the action unspools. We learn about the history of the living room and the land on which the house is built. Then, in the living room, we move forward and back in time to look at characters watching TV, snoozing on the sofa, catching a cold, stubbing a toe — the everyday stuff unlikely to quicken one’s pulse.
Until, that is, you begin to appreciate McGuire’s extraordinary command of history and pacing. Panel by panel, the main protagonist is revealed to be not any of the characters, the room or even the land the house is constructed on but, rather, something more abstract: time.
McGuire’s method may already be familiar to some readers. In 1989, when he was an aspiring New York artist and musician, he published a six-page, black-and-white version of Here in the avant-garde comics magazine Raw. Twenty-five years later, the concept is repeated but over an enlarged space.
Each spread is dated but they are not ordered chronologically. There are panels within panels showing different points in time and giving glimpses of what was visible in exactly that spot at that particular time, transforming each spread into a kind of palimpsest of layered scenes. At the beginning and end, dinosaurs and futuristic animals roam in place of the house (which, it turns out, is in New Jersey, where McGuire grew up). Later spreads depict impending disaster — in one dated 2113, the house has been submerged by the sea.
To pick up on the streams of association that unite moments across the centuries demands close attention from the reader. In a panel dated 1624, members of a Native American tribe come into contact with European settlers. Much later in the book, a panel dated 1986 shows researchers who are looking for artefacts visiting the house to inform the elderly lady living there that: “We have reason to believe that your property may potentially be an important site.”
McGuire occasionally references real-world events, great and small: characters play Twister in 1966 (the year the game was invented); in a panel dated 1775, Benjamin Franklin visits the grand colonial pile across the street from the living room on the eve of the revolution to argue with his estranged loyalist son, living there at the time.
McGuire is able to wring a surprising array of emotions from simple lines and blocks of muted colour interspersed with deliberately hackneyed jokes and the uncanny wisdom of the everyday. And the non-chronological arrangement seems faithful to how consciousness really works, the way we shape and reshape the story of ourselves by editing and re-editing highlights from our lives.
I found it compelling to shuttle around in time to discover how earlier events informed later ones. Midway through the book one character says to another: “Life has a flair for rhyming events.” Clearly, McGuire does too. - John Sunyer
Richard McGuire is a jack of many trades. He's a musician, a toy designer, a children's book author, an illustrator and animator. He's a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. He's created animated shorts that subvert our sense of light by playing with negative space, a puzzle made of almost identical pieces, a number of children's books, including one about the disparate adventures of 14 different oranges (some have unhappy fates), and more.
As a founding member and bassist of the underground band Liquid Liquid, McGuire is also credited with one of the most famous basslines in the last 30 years.
In 1989, a 36-panel comic by McGuire appeared in Raw Magazine, volume 2, issue 1. The comic centered on an idea or whimsy that might strike anyone at any moment: what might have happened here, in this very spot, in the past and what might happen here in the future?
Among a vanguard of cartoonists and illustrators, the comic, aptly named Here, had the impact of an elegant and groundbreaking theorem. In the years that followed, admirers grasped that McGuire's short work, with its straightforward black and white drawings, was a brilliant meditation on time, impermanence, metamorphosis and mortality.
Chris Ware said of that strip, “[McGuire] revolutionized the narrative possibilities of comic strips. I think he's a genius and what he gave every reader with Here was an individual and unique way of looking at life, and additionally (to this cartoonist at least) it was life-changing.”
Twenty-five years later, Pantheon Books is publishing McGuire's new book and an e-book, also called Here. The new work has provoked much fanfare, including a seven-week-long special exhibition in early fall titled, “From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book” at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
The 300-plus page book extends the idea of his short 1989 work, reinvents the concept and gives it vibrant new life in curious, software-manipulated watercolors. Like that earlier, shorter work, Here scans back and forth across billions of years – millennia, centuries, years and even intervals of only seconds pass. But past, present and a vividly imagined future are all set in the same specific spot.
The fulcrum of the book is a corner in the living room of a 20th-century house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. We see the house's inhabitants, including McGuire's family in the ’60s and ’70s, and we also see untouched forests and primordial wastes that spanned there eons ago, dinosaurs, swamps, forests, Lenape Indians, Dutch traders, colonists, and other past inhabitants of the region, people in years to come, apocalyptic scenes in the near and far-distant future and more.
The experience bends the mind. My initial reaction was tentative, even puzzled. But I soon found myself immersed and often moved. Here has the surprising depth of a magician's top hat. The combination of the surreal and the nostalgic are mesmerizing. The book is an ingenious epic of time and space, and I think readers everywhere, and of many ages, will find it delightful.
I had a chance to talk with Richard McGuire a few weeks before the book's scheduled publication in early December. I was eager to find out about the vision and inspiration behind his unique book, its transformation from the short 1989 comic, and the extensive research he undertook to give it a solid foundation in billions of years of history and fact.
McGuire has lived in Greenwich Village since his early 20s, when he graduated from Rutgers. I reached him there, while he was enjoying his morning coffee. I started out by asking him about the aspects of the book that appear to be based on his family.
"Well, in the first [1989] version my brother was the focus, and at the time I was only 30 and he was about 32, and then I had him growing old and that was kind of funny at the time. But my parents have since passed away, and they're kind of the main focus of it now. That was kind of a nod to them, because my parents and my oldest sister Mary, who is in the book too, she passed away around the same time of cancer. That's sort of a dark time. It was more my parents' story because they bought the house and it was their house and they had lived there right till the end.
"It ended up by default having my family in it. It was never meant to be a story about my growing up as much as it was just about time. Then I got all this source material and family photos. There are little personal moments in it.
"I felt I had to give it depth and I had to do a lot of research about that area, but this is where it gets sort of tricky, because the book has such a wider scope. Of course it has some personal stuff in it. In the middle of working on the book we were closing the house and selling it. So I took all these photographs. Going over all this stuff you start to find all sorts of great, little casual moments. But it was never in a specific place because I wanted it to feel like just any place. It's not the history, it's like a tiny history. It's working on both levels."
I asked McGuire how his family and siblings feel about the book.
"They got a kick out of it. I mean my whole family does, my extended family and everyone was excited to see it. I threw a lot of people in there that I know. There're even people who worked on the book in there. I mean I tried to make it really inclusive of everybody."
One of the ways in which I think the book is very successful is that it put me through a lot of different moods: nostalgia or wonder or fear or anxiety. I asked McGuire if working on the book was an emotional experience.
"Well, going through the closing of the house was definitely an emotional thing. But you know this isn't a one-to-one connection to my house. I mean, if you looked at my living room it doesn't look at all like this particular living room. There're some elements that are the same, but . . . I was concerned about having the book have an emotional vibe. What I was mainly worried about was whether, without having a protagonist, would you feel any emotion without being taken through someone's story?
"I had a lot of people giving me feedback and they had been touched by it. I was hoping to get something in there. There's a scene where you see I'm with my dad, and my dad was really going downhill at one point and all that stuff was really hard to go through. I think going through all those family photos and especially after my parents passed away and my sister, it was a cathartic thing to go look at all that stuff. And I ended up having a lot of opinions about time, because they were always on my mind while I was working on the book.
"There's even a scene where you see these two guys and they're in the future and they're looking at these panels that are floating in the air and one of them sticks their head in the panel and becomes the younger version of themselves.
"That came from a dream I had where I was in the house and I was walking around and I see my mom and I asked if Mary was around which was my sister. And then she says, 'Oh, she'll be here soon.' And then I looked out the window and I saw a younger version of Mary like a teenage person. And I opened the window and I stuck my head out to call to her and then I realized I was younger because I suddenly had all this hair in my face. I had long hair when I was a teenager. And then I woke up and I remembered thinking, 'That was amazing!' I stuck my head through that window and I became a younger version. So then I tried to work that into the book.
I asked McGuire if he enjoyed the process of researching and finding out about the geologic, natural and human history of the region.
"It was a lot of fun doing the research. It was about a year of research. I got a fellowship at the New York Public Library and that really helped a lot. I had signed that contract [with Pantheon] years before and I'm glad I didn't do the book then. It would have been a totally different book. Having had the experience of my parents passing and then a sibling passing and then the idea of leaving the house . . . All those issues made it a deeper experience.
"But I think that and having the time to spend doing the research of the area and all that stuff made it a better book. And then it was about, I'd say, a year and a half of doing the artwork. Because I wasn't doing any of the artwork when I was doing the research. I mean I did a little bit, but I feel like every project I do, I feel I have to kind of find a way in. Because if you look at the other work I've done I can stretch my style in different ways. It's not like I have one way of working. And that was a big struggle for me, just to try and find the right way to go back into the book because I didn't want the book to just be the way it looked originally. I wasn't planning on just adding pages to the original. I always felt I had to kind of find a way to reinvent it. And I was doing experiments with water color and vector art and trying to find the balance."
While I was reading the book, I noticed the familiar face of Ben Franklin. Having grown up in Philadelphia, the face that adorns the $100 bill is as familiar as a beloved old uncle's. After doing some of my own research I discovered that a historic house, called the Proprietary House, that features prominently in Here, stands across the street from the book's focal living room. The house had served as the residence of New Jersey's colonial-era Royal Governor – William Franklin, Ben Franklin's estranged son. I asked McGuire about the cameo.
"I didn't want to announce him. I don't know if you read anything . . . But, yeah, it really did happen and then I found out more in research. That house is actually even closer than I show in the book. It's really directly right across the street from where I grew up. But I never really knew the whole scoop of what was going on over there. I just knew that Ben Franklin had something to do with the place. And then when I did the research I found out that it was his son who lived there, who was a Loyalist.
"Ben and him were really close growing up, but over the years they went their separate ways politically. Ben went there to kind of talk sense into him. And [William] ended up being arrested when the Revolution happened. And I think that was possibly the last time they ever saw each other, that confrontation. Because I read as many letters as I could about that situation. But I didn't want that to be such a big focus of the book because everything in the book is just passing through. It's hilarious to have this like celebrity. But everyone has their little walk around the park.
"I had this motto working on the book, and that was, 'Make everything big, small and make everything small, big'. And so the idea of that moment was to reduce it to just an argument between a father and a son. It was trying to boil it down."
The scenes between Ben and William Franklin are brief, but a quote ascribed to Benjamin Franklin seemed to me to aptly convey the themes and circularity of the book. Franklin says, "Life has a flair for rhyming events." I asked McGuire what the quote means to him?
"Well I'm always fascinated by those kind of loops that happen. This happens so repeatedly in life, things swing around. It happens to everyone, I suppose. In that particular case [Ben Franklin] really did come to the town when he was 15 and he really did come back when he was much older with his 15-year-old grandson in tow.
"It happens to me all the time. I did this strip, how long ago? Twenty-five years ago, and 10 years after that I thought I should do it as a book, and I signed the contract with Pantheon right around, I guess, '98 or '99 or something like that. I know it was before Chris Ware's book, Jimmy Corrigan. And I think Chris was the one who told me about Pantheon, and then I signed the contract, and then I ended up getting side tracked.
"It's like my music. Me and my band, my music has been reissued repeatedly over the years, going around in circles. When it was reissued the last time we ended up playing all these big shows and it's just strange. I keep putting things down and they keep circling around. My toys are being reissued now. So it just seems like everything's looping around."
I had received a beta version of the e-book version of Here. I asked McGuire about the process of making a digital version of the book.
"Well that was a really important thing too about the reinvention of the whole project. When I knew I wanted to go back into the book I definitely wanted to do it as an interactive thing because it seemed so perfect for that.
"I was in London giving a lecture about my work and I touched on the project. At that point I was doing the research. And I said that I wanted to try to do an interactive version and there was a guy in the audience, that was Stephen Betts, who's a program art developer. He's also a huge fan of the original. He wrote me and sent me a little model that he did, taking the original story and just making a little kind of thing where you can move within it.
"He said he was planning on moving to New York. So when he got here we worked on it for about two years together. We went through a lot of changes, and now we have the 1.0 version which is going to be launched when the book happens. It really does explode the book. If you click on the date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to shuffle the pages. You're not just looking at it as a book anymore.
"It was another one of these things where I didn't want to spell it out. Because everybody who sees it at first thinks the e-book resembles the book version. But if you play with it long enough, you start to click on the dates and the panels and that's enough of a clue that once you click on that one date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to open up the shuffling mechanism, and that's still surprising to me.
"Also, if you touch the panels themselves, sometimes you can follow a thread. Like when the artist and the model are talking [a narrative thread in the book], if you just want to read that, you just touch the panels and you can continue through that thread. Because some of the panels are stacked so they work as threads.
"It's the reshuffling of it that is the most exciting thing for me. I mean, I'm still surprised there are so many combinations. I was thinking about this the other day. I've never counted all the panels in the book, but I was thinking about just the normal card deck of 52 cards and that always seems like an endless variety of possibilities. So I was thinking, 'My god, I never calculated it but there must be an immense number of combinations that can happen.' And sometimes, I start to see patterns of things that I didn't intend that just happen.
"There's actually a lot of stuff you start to see in the e-book that's covered up in the book. Because when the panel is removed sometimes there's stuff underneath that you would never get to see otherwise. And we're also introducing animation."
I told McGuire that I was surprised to stumble on the animation of a cat walking across a panel.
"Yeah there're a few things like that in this version. I want them to be more of a surprise then to be like a bad animated film or something. The fire in the fireplace is one of the things. And then there's a breeze that comes through the window and the curtain moves. Somebody turns the page of a book and things like that, just small things. But they don't happen every time. They're really tiny events."
I had read in my own research that McGuire's original strip in 1989 was partly influenced by the Microsoft Windows operating system. I asked him about that.
"Yeah, well, I took a lecture series with [Art] Spiegelman and he was talking about comic diagrams and I think that started my thoughts on it. Then I tried to do a story where it was split down the center and that's why I did the corner of a room to begin with, cause I split the screen and I wanted half the room to be going forward in time and half the room to be going backward in time. And I was showing that to a friend and this friend had just got the Windows program and started explaining how that worked. And that's when it hit me. I was like, 'Oh, I can have multiple views of time . . .' So it really was that. That was the trigger."
I mentioned that McGuire's description of that eureka moment reminded me of his enthusiasm for the e-book project, and brought to mind what we'd discussed earlier, about life's flair for rhyming events.
"Exactly, exactly. It's going right back to the original idea. It really is. And it's a full circle thing of being able to introduce it as that. But you know there were a lot of elements. I was thinking about this, about how my dad used to take pictures of us always in the same location every year. I show a sampling of those in the book. And I think that had a lot to do with me thinking about time and space. Because I grew up with those photographs every year. I think that that had something to do with it."
I asked McGuire about the process behind the distinctive artwork, which look like old, digitally manipulated photos or photorealistic illustrations, enhanced with watercolors. What method did he use? Where did he work?
"I had a studio in Brooklyn. I'm just closing that out now that the book is done. I'm moving to a new place, because I just wanted to start fresh. I was struggling at the beginning and I was just doing all these experiments and then I was trying all these different styles, different techniques. And then at one point I started just collaging it together and felt that it looked okay and I was kind of surprised. It kind of works in that scrapbook kind of way, where it somehow is signified in the end. And also I think it's kind of nice to have some things that are softer because it kind of changes your focus on things. "I wasn't planning. Some of those things that ended up in the book were like sketches that I never thought would be finishes for the book, but I kind of liked the speed at which these things were done. Some are slow and some are fast. So there's the idea that even that is time based in the execution. I started to think that that's just another factor of the book, to have that, and to allow that to happen. But I wasn't planning on it in the beginning. It was one of those things that just evolved. And then a lot of the unifying things, I guess, masking . . . a lot of the work was done by hand and put into the computer and then colored in the computer. But some things are not. Some things are more colors and then enhanced with Photoshop.
"In the very, very, very beginning, I thought at the end of the book I would have all these beautiful paintings, and it didn't work out that way at all. It really was totally created in the computer and it had to be because I was going to do the e-book. I knew everything had to be not locked down. I couldn't have finished paintings of these spreads. All the elements had to always remain open and free to be shuffled. I knew that from the start. So the book is the finished art. That's the way I've always talked about it too.
"One of the things that was a big influence on me and that I was looking at were all these Japanese wood block books. There's all of this preparation and the final book is the finished book."
I asked McGuire if he has plans for another book.
"I do have stuff that I've been kind of working on and putting away that I want to get back to, a few different projects. I'm going to do an exhibition in Paris in January. I'm going to do some paintings of panels in the book, and then I'm going to paint them life sized so, like, the window will be a window-sized painting. I'm going to probably do, I don't know, maybe 10 to 20 paintings, separate standalone paintings so that the show will be half like the Morgan show and then the other half will be the paintings. And then, in the middle, there will be a projected thing of the e-book, somebody playing like a full screen thing of the e-book with reconfigurations."
Knowing how many creative hats he wears, I asked McGuire how he balances all of the different fields and projects he's engaged in.
"I feel like it's very organic how everything just happened to come up and then circle back. When I was first starting out I just thought I was going to be an artist and that's all, and then I came to New York – well, actually before I came to New York I put the band together. And I was working at all these galleries and bringing up my own artwork. But then it kind of ran its course. I did a few comics, then went on to doing kids' books, kids' books led to doing animation, but I was involved with animation before that. Then the kids' books got reprinted, and the toys are being redone. The music is going to be reissued again. This will be the third time it's been repackaged. It's coming out in the spring."
At the end of our conversation I confess to McGuire that I was a little nervous before I contacted him, somewhat awed by the fact that he's behind the bassline for Liquid Liquid's 1983 classic, "Cavern." I also ask him what's in store for the rest of his Sunday.
[Laughing] "Before this book came out I was thinking, 'Well at least now I've got the book that people will remember instead of, 'he's the guy who did that . . .' I've got to move out of my studio today, so I've got to go rent a car and this is going to be a day of schlepping stuff."
Note that Richard McGuire’s quotes have been edited for length and clarity. - Patrick Lohier
Before Richard Linklater made the decision -- hailed as groundbreaking -- to film a single actor for 12 years, Richard McGuire used his own artistic medium to chronicle the life of a single room over the course of millennia. His 1989 comic series “Here” was quietly published by Art Spiegelman in RAW magazine, and this month the concept has been put into a graphic novel of the same name.
When we first meet our protagonist -- the corner of a living room nestled within a house built in colonial America -- it’s 1957, and she’s decked out in shades of mauve, with a crib situated at her center and a painting of an overgrown forest hung above her fireplace. In short, she's an ordinary room -- a womb fostering small, universal moments.
On the next page, it’s 1942, and on the next, 2007. Little has changed but the wallpaper and the texture of the couch. When we return to 1957, a woman enters, and wonders aloud, “Hmm… now why did I come in here again?”
This quotidian scene, which bookends the story (in the end we return to the woman, who remembers she wanted to pick up a book from the coffee table) sets the tone for most that follow -- other than a few climactic pages, McGuire’s book concerns itself with private laughs, family portraits, teens studying and couples redecorating.
The drama, then, arises not from the plot, but from the convergence of many plots. In 1986, a doorbell rings. Simultaneously occurring on the same page is a conversation from 1609, when an American Indian couple rustling in the same spot in the woods stops in their tracks to whisper: “Ntelsitam” (“I heard something”). A man from an archeological society enters the 1986 living room, inquiring about the home’s backyard, which could house the remains of a burial site. A soda-drinking boy nods along, wearing a shirt that reads “Future Transitional Fossil.”
McGuire’s tinkering with time is more than clever. Readers have taken chronological leaps before, using machines invented by sci-fi writers, the many pages of hefty bildungsroman, or the modernist conventions that fold years into sentences. But allowing a brief history of the world, from 80,000,000 B.C. to 2213, to swirl around a living room -- a setting that’s intimate but not too intimate -- is particularly moving.
Hearing Revolutionary War-era sons quibbling with their fathers over politics reminds us of how permanent some facets of humanity are. McGuire does this in a way that doesn’t undermine the dramas that make up our lives, no matter how insignificant they may seem when read aside a thumping dinosaur (the dinosaur gets one panel, and a Halloween party gets several pages).
While McGuire’s original panels were inventive in their own right –- separate scenes set in different eras would take up flat space within a single image of the room, removing chronology from the representation of time –- the book format is even more impressive. Turning its pages doesn’t thrust you forward or backward, but just elsewhere. The result is a tenderly deconstructed flip book that’s worth reading if only for its pleasant depictions of the near future.- Maddie Crum
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Very slowly, over the following pages, the action unspools. We learn about the history of the living room and the land on which the house is built. Then, in the living room, we move forward and back in time to look at characters watching TV, snoozing on the sofa, catching a cold, stubbing a toe — the everyday stuff unlikely to quicken one’s pulse.
Until, that is, you begin to appreciate McGuire’s extraordinary command of history and pacing. Panel by panel, the main protagonist is revealed to be not any of the characters, the room or even the land the house is constructed on but, rather, something more abstract: time.
McGuire’s method may already be familiar to some readers. In 1989, when he was an aspiring New York artist and musician, he published a six-page, black-and-white version of Here in the avant-garde comics magazine Raw. Twenty-five years later, the concept is repeated but over an enlarged space.
Each spread is dated but they are not ordered chronologically. There are panels within panels showing different points in time and giving glimpses of what was visible in exactly that spot at that particular time, transforming each spread into a kind of palimpsest of layered scenes. At the beginning and end, dinosaurs and futuristic animals roam in place of the house (which, it turns out, is in New Jersey, where McGuire grew up). Later spreads depict impending disaster — in one dated 2113, the house has been submerged by the sea.
To pick up on the streams of association that unite moments across the centuries demands close attention from the reader. In a panel dated 1624, members of a Native American tribe come into contact with European settlers. Much later in the book, a panel dated 1986 shows researchers who are looking for artefacts visiting the house to inform the elderly lady living there that: “We have reason to believe that your property may potentially be an important site.”
McGuire occasionally references real-world events, great and small: characters play Twister in 1966 (the year the game was invented); in a panel dated 1775, Benjamin Franklin visits the grand colonial pile across the street from the living room on the eve of the revolution to argue with his estranged loyalist son, living there at the time.
McGuire is able to wring a surprising array of emotions from simple lines and blocks of muted colour interspersed with deliberately hackneyed jokes and the uncanny wisdom of the everyday. And the non-chronological arrangement seems faithful to how consciousness really works, the way we shape and reshape the story of ourselves by editing and re-editing highlights from our lives.
I found it compelling to shuttle around in time to discover how earlier events informed later ones. Midway through the book one character says to another: “Life has a flair for rhyming events.” Clearly, McGuire does too. - John Sunyer
Richard McGuire is a jack of many trades. He's a musician, a toy designer, a children's book author, an illustrator and animator. He's a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. He's created animated shorts that subvert our sense of light by playing with negative space, a puzzle made of almost identical pieces, a number of children's books, including one about the disparate adventures of 14 different oranges (some have unhappy fates), and more.
As a founding member and bassist of the underground band Liquid Liquid, McGuire is also credited with one of the most famous basslines in the last 30 years.
In 1989, a 36-panel comic by McGuire appeared in Raw Magazine, volume 2, issue 1. The comic centered on an idea or whimsy that might strike anyone at any moment: what might have happened here, in this very spot, in the past and what might happen here in the future?
Among a vanguard of cartoonists and illustrators, the comic, aptly named Here, had the impact of an elegant and groundbreaking theorem. In the years that followed, admirers grasped that McGuire's short work, with its straightforward black and white drawings, was a brilliant meditation on time, impermanence, metamorphosis and mortality.
Chris Ware said of that strip, “[McGuire] revolutionized the narrative possibilities of comic strips. I think he's a genius and what he gave every reader with Here was an individual and unique way of looking at life, and additionally (to this cartoonist at least) it was life-changing.”
Twenty-five years later, Pantheon Books is publishing McGuire's new book and an e-book, also called Here. The new work has provoked much fanfare, including a seven-week-long special exhibition in early fall titled, “From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book” at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
The 300-plus page book extends the idea of his short 1989 work, reinvents the concept and gives it vibrant new life in curious, software-manipulated watercolors. Like that earlier, shorter work, Here scans back and forth across billions of years – millennia, centuries, years and even intervals of only seconds pass. But past, present and a vividly imagined future are all set in the same specific spot.
The fulcrum of the book is a corner in the living room of a 20th-century house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. We see the house's inhabitants, including McGuire's family in the ’60s and ’70s, and we also see untouched forests and primordial wastes that spanned there eons ago, dinosaurs, swamps, forests, Lenape Indians, Dutch traders, colonists, and other past inhabitants of the region, people in years to come, apocalyptic scenes in the near and far-distant future and more.
The experience bends the mind. My initial reaction was tentative, even puzzled. But I soon found myself immersed and often moved. Here has the surprising depth of a magician's top hat. The combination of the surreal and the nostalgic are mesmerizing. The book is an ingenious epic of time and space, and I think readers everywhere, and of many ages, will find it delightful.
I had a chance to talk with Richard McGuire a few weeks before the book's scheduled publication in early December. I was eager to find out about the vision and inspiration behind his unique book, its transformation from the short 1989 comic, and the extensive research he undertook to give it a solid foundation in billions of years of history and fact.
McGuire has lived in Greenwich Village since his early 20s, when he graduated from Rutgers. I reached him there, while he was enjoying his morning coffee. I started out by asking him about the aspects of the book that appear to be based on his family.
"Well, in the first [1989] version my brother was the focus, and at the time I was only 30 and he was about 32, and then I had him growing old and that was kind of funny at the time. But my parents have since passed away, and they're kind of the main focus of it now. That was kind of a nod to them, because my parents and my oldest sister Mary, who is in the book too, she passed away around the same time of cancer. That's sort of a dark time. It was more my parents' story because they bought the house and it was their house and they had lived there right till the end.
"It ended up by default having my family in it. It was never meant to be a story about my growing up as much as it was just about time. Then I got all this source material and family photos. There are little personal moments in it.
"I felt I had to give it depth and I had to do a lot of research about that area, but this is where it gets sort of tricky, because the book has such a wider scope. Of course it has some personal stuff in it. In the middle of working on the book we were closing the house and selling it. So I took all these photographs. Going over all this stuff you start to find all sorts of great, little casual moments. But it was never in a specific place because I wanted it to feel like just any place. It's not the history, it's like a tiny history. It's working on both levels."
I asked McGuire how his family and siblings feel about the book.
"They got a kick out of it. I mean my whole family does, my extended family and everyone was excited to see it. I threw a lot of people in there that I know. There're even people who worked on the book in there. I mean I tried to make it really inclusive of everybody."
One of the ways in which I think the book is very successful is that it put me through a lot of different moods: nostalgia or wonder or fear or anxiety. I asked McGuire if working on the book was an emotional experience.
"Well, going through the closing of the house was definitely an emotional thing. But you know this isn't a one-to-one connection to my house. I mean, if you looked at my living room it doesn't look at all like this particular living room. There're some elements that are the same, but . . . I was concerned about having the book have an emotional vibe. What I was mainly worried about was whether, without having a protagonist, would you feel any emotion without being taken through someone's story?
"I had a lot of people giving me feedback and they had been touched by it. I was hoping to get something in there. There's a scene where you see I'm with my dad, and my dad was really going downhill at one point and all that stuff was really hard to go through. I think going through all those family photos and especially after my parents passed away and my sister, it was a cathartic thing to go look at all that stuff. And I ended up having a lot of opinions about time, because they were always on my mind while I was working on the book.
"There's even a scene where you see these two guys and they're in the future and they're looking at these panels that are floating in the air and one of them sticks their head in the panel and becomes the younger version of themselves.
"That came from a dream I had where I was in the house and I was walking around and I see my mom and I asked if Mary was around which was my sister. And then she says, 'Oh, she'll be here soon.' And then I looked out the window and I saw a younger version of Mary like a teenage person. And I opened the window and I stuck my head out to call to her and then I realized I was younger because I suddenly had all this hair in my face. I had long hair when I was a teenager. And then I woke up and I remembered thinking, 'That was amazing!' I stuck my head through that window and I became a younger version. So then I tried to work that into the book.
I asked McGuire if he enjoyed the process of researching and finding out about the geologic, natural and human history of the region.
"It was a lot of fun doing the research. It was about a year of research. I got a fellowship at the New York Public Library and that really helped a lot. I had signed that contract [with Pantheon] years before and I'm glad I didn't do the book then. It would have been a totally different book. Having had the experience of my parents passing and then a sibling passing and then the idea of leaving the house . . . All those issues made it a deeper experience.
"But I think that and having the time to spend doing the research of the area and all that stuff made it a better book. And then it was about, I'd say, a year and a half of doing the artwork. Because I wasn't doing any of the artwork when I was doing the research. I mean I did a little bit, but I feel like every project I do, I feel I have to kind of find a way in. Because if you look at the other work I've done I can stretch my style in different ways. It's not like I have one way of working. And that was a big struggle for me, just to try and find the right way to go back into the book because I didn't want the book to just be the way it looked originally. I wasn't planning on just adding pages to the original. I always felt I had to kind of find a way to reinvent it. And I was doing experiments with water color and vector art and trying to find the balance."
While I was reading the book, I noticed the familiar face of Ben Franklin. Having grown up in Philadelphia, the face that adorns the $100 bill is as familiar as a beloved old uncle's. After doing some of my own research I discovered that a historic house, called the Proprietary House, that features prominently in Here, stands across the street from the book's focal living room. The house had served as the residence of New Jersey's colonial-era Royal Governor – William Franklin, Ben Franklin's estranged son. I asked McGuire about the cameo.
"I didn't want to announce him. I don't know if you read anything . . . But, yeah, it really did happen and then I found out more in research. That house is actually even closer than I show in the book. It's really directly right across the street from where I grew up. But I never really knew the whole scoop of what was going on over there. I just knew that Ben Franklin had something to do with the place. And then when I did the research I found out that it was his son who lived there, who was a Loyalist.
"Ben and him were really close growing up, but over the years they went their separate ways politically. Ben went there to kind of talk sense into him. And [William] ended up being arrested when the Revolution happened. And I think that was possibly the last time they ever saw each other, that confrontation. Because I read as many letters as I could about that situation. But I didn't want that to be such a big focus of the book because everything in the book is just passing through. It's hilarious to have this like celebrity. But everyone has their little walk around the park.
"I had this motto working on the book, and that was, 'Make everything big, small and make everything small, big'. And so the idea of that moment was to reduce it to just an argument between a father and a son. It was trying to boil it down."
The scenes between Ben and William Franklin are brief, but a quote ascribed to Benjamin Franklin seemed to me to aptly convey the themes and circularity of the book. Franklin says, "Life has a flair for rhyming events." I asked McGuire what the quote means to him?
"Well I'm always fascinated by those kind of loops that happen. This happens so repeatedly in life, things swing around. It happens to everyone, I suppose. In that particular case [Ben Franklin] really did come to the town when he was 15 and he really did come back when he was much older with his 15-year-old grandson in tow.
"It happens to me all the time. I did this strip, how long ago? Twenty-five years ago, and 10 years after that I thought I should do it as a book, and I signed the contract with Pantheon right around, I guess, '98 or '99 or something like that. I know it was before Chris Ware's book, Jimmy Corrigan. And I think Chris was the one who told me about Pantheon, and then I signed the contract, and then I ended up getting side tracked.
"It's like my music. Me and my band, my music has been reissued repeatedly over the years, going around in circles. When it was reissued the last time we ended up playing all these big shows and it's just strange. I keep putting things down and they keep circling around. My toys are being reissued now. So it just seems like everything's looping around."
I had received a beta version of the e-book version of Here. I asked McGuire about the process of making a digital version of the book.
"Well that was a really important thing too about the reinvention of the whole project. When I knew I wanted to go back into the book I definitely wanted to do it as an interactive thing because it seemed so perfect for that.
"I was in London giving a lecture about my work and I touched on the project. At that point I was doing the research. And I said that I wanted to try to do an interactive version and there was a guy in the audience, that was Stephen Betts, who's a program art developer. He's also a huge fan of the original. He wrote me and sent me a little model that he did, taking the original story and just making a little kind of thing where you can move within it.
"He said he was planning on moving to New York. So when he got here we worked on it for about two years together. We went through a lot of changes, and now we have the 1.0 version which is going to be launched when the book happens. It really does explode the book. If you click on the date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to shuffle the pages. You're not just looking at it as a book anymore.
"It was another one of these things where I didn't want to spell it out. Because everybody who sees it at first thinks the e-book resembles the book version. But if you play with it long enough, you start to click on the dates and the panels and that's enough of a clue that once you click on that one date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to open up the shuffling mechanism, and that's still surprising to me.
"Also, if you touch the panels themselves, sometimes you can follow a thread. Like when the artist and the model are talking [a narrative thread in the book], if you just want to read that, you just touch the panels and you can continue through that thread. Because some of the panels are stacked so they work as threads.
"It's the reshuffling of it that is the most exciting thing for me. I mean, I'm still surprised there are so many combinations. I was thinking about this the other day. I've never counted all the panels in the book, but I was thinking about just the normal card deck of 52 cards and that always seems like an endless variety of possibilities. So I was thinking, 'My god, I never calculated it but there must be an immense number of combinations that can happen.' And sometimes, I start to see patterns of things that I didn't intend that just happen.
"There's actually a lot of stuff you start to see in the e-book that's covered up in the book. Because when the panel is removed sometimes there's stuff underneath that you would never get to see otherwise. And we're also introducing animation."
I told McGuire that I was surprised to stumble on the animation of a cat walking across a panel.
"Yeah there're a few things like that in this version. I want them to be more of a surprise then to be like a bad animated film or something. The fire in the fireplace is one of the things. And then there's a breeze that comes through the window and the curtain moves. Somebody turns the page of a book and things like that, just small things. But they don't happen every time. They're really tiny events."
I had read in my own research that McGuire's original strip in 1989 was partly influenced by the Microsoft Windows operating system. I asked him about that.
"Yeah, well, I took a lecture series with [Art] Spiegelman and he was talking about comic diagrams and I think that started my thoughts on it. Then I tried to do a story where it was split down the center and that's why I did the corner of a room to begin with, cause I split the screen and I wanted half the room to be going forward in time and half the room to be going backward in time. And I was showing that to a friend and this friend had just got the Windows program and started explaining how that worked. And that's when it hit me. I was like, 'Oh, I can have multiple views of time . . .' So it really was that. That was the trigger."
I mentioned that McGuire's description of that eureka moment reminded me of his enthusiasm for the e-book project, and brought to mind what we'd discussed earlier, about life's flair for rhyming events.
"Exactly, exactly. It's going right back to the original idea. It really is. And it's a full circle thing of being able to introduce it as that. But you know there were a lot of elements. I was thinking about this, about how my dad used to take pictures of us always in the same location every year. I show a sampling of those in the book. And I think that had a lot to do with me thinking about time and space. Because I grew up with those photographs every year. I think that that had something to do with it."
I asked McGuire about the process behind the distinctive artwork, which look like old, digitally manipulated photos or photorealistic illustrations, enhanced with watercolors. What method did he use? Where did he work?
"I had a studio in Brooklyn. I'm just closing that out now that the book is done. I'm moving to a new place, because I just wanted to start fresh. I was struggling at the beginning and I was just doing all these experiments and then I was trying all these different styles, different techniques. And then at one point I started just collaging it together and felt that it looked okay and I was kind of surprised. It kind of works in that scrapbook kind of way, where it somehow is signified in the end. And also I think it's kind of nice to have some things that are softer because it kind of changes your focus on things. "I wasn't planning. Some of those things that ended up in the book were like sketches that I never thought would be finishes for the book, but I kind of liked the speed at which these things were done. Some are slow and some are fast. So there's the idea that even that is time based in the execution. I started to think that that's just another factor of the book, to have that, and to allow that to happen. But I wasn't planning on it in the beginning. It was one of those things that just evolved. And then a lot of the unifying things, I guess, masking . . . a lot of the work was done by hand and put into the computer and then colored in the computer. But some things are not. Some things are more colors and then enhanced with Photoshop.
"In the very, very, very beginning, I thought at the end of the book I would have all these beautiful paintings, and it didn't work out that way at all. It really was totally created in the computer and it had to be because I was going to do the e-book. I knew everything had to be not locked down. I couldn't have finished paintings of these spreads. All the elements had to always remain open and free to be shuffled. I knew that from the start. So the book is the finished art. That's the way I've always talked about it too.
"One of the things that was a big influence on me and that I was looking at were all these Japanese wood block books. There's all of this preparation and the final book is the finished book."
I asked McGuire if he has plans for another book.
"I do have stuff that I've been kind of working on and putting away that I want to get back to, a few different projects. I'm going to do an exhibition in Paris in January. I'm going to do some paintings of panels in the book, and then I'm going to paint them life sized so, like, the window will be a window-sized painting. I'm going to probably do, I don't know, maybe 10 to 20 paintings, separate standalone paintings so that the show will be half like the Morgan show and then the other half will be the paintings. And then, in the middle, there will be a projected thing of the e-book, somebody playing like a full screen thing of the e-book with reconfigurations."
Knowing how many creative hats he wears, I asked McGuire how he balances all of the different fields and projects he's engaged in.
"I feel like it's very organic how everything just happened to come up and then circle back. When I was first starting out I just thought I was going to be an artist and that's all, and then I came to New York – well, actually before I came to New York I put the band together. And I was working at all these galleries and bringing up my own artwork. But then it kind of ran its course. I did a few comics, then went on to doing kids' books, kids' books led to doing animation, but I was involved with animation before that. Then the kids' books got reprinted, and the toys are being redone. The music is going to be reissued again. This will be the third time it's been repackaged. It's coming out in the spring."
At the end of our conversation I confess to McGuire that I was a little nervous before I contacted him, somewhat awed by the fact that he's behind the bassline for Liquid Liquid's 1983 classic, "Cavern." I also ask him what's in store for the rest of his Sunday.
[Laughing] "Before this book came out I was thinking, 'Well at least now I've got the book that people will remember instead of, 'he's the guy who did that . . .' I've got to move out of my studio today, so I've got to go rent a car and this is going to be a day of schlepping stuff."
Note that Richard McGuire’s quotes have been edited for length and clarity. - Patrick Lohier
Before Richard Linklater made the decision -- hailed as groundbreaking -- to film a single actor for 12 years, Richard McGuire used his own artistic medium to chronicle the life of a single room over the course of millennia. His 1989 comic series “Here” was quietly published by Art Spiegelman in RAW magazine, and this month the concept has been put into a graphic novel of the same name.
When we first meet our protagonist -- the corner of a living room nestled within a house built in colonial America -- it’s 1957, and she’s decked out in shades of mauve, with a crib situated at her center and a painting of an overgrown forest hung above her fireplace. In short, she's an ordinary room -- a womb fostering small, universal moments.
On the next page, it’s 1942, and on the next, 2007. Little has changed but the wallpaper and the texture of the couch. When we return to 1957, a woman enters, and wonders aloud, “Hmm… now why did I come in here again?”
This quotidian scene, which bookends the story (in the end we return to the woman, who remembers she wanted to pick up a book from the coffee table) sets the tone for most that follow -- other than a few climactic pages, McGuire’s book concerns itself with private laughs, family portraits, teens studying and couples redecorating.
The drama, then, arises not from the plot, but from the convergence of many plots. In 1986, a doorbell rings. Simultaneously occurring on the same page is a conversation from 1609, when an American Indian couple rustling in the same spot in the woods stops in their tracks to whisper: “Ntelsitam” (“I heard something”). A man from an archeological society enters the 1986 living room, inquiring about the home’s backyard, which could house the remains of a burial site. A soda-drinking boy nods along, wearing a shirt that reads “Future Transitional Fossil.”
McGuire’s tinkering with time is more than clever. Readers have taken chronological leaps before, using machines invented by sci-fi writers, the many pages of hefty bildungsroman, or the modernist conventions that fold years into sentences. But allowing a brief history of the world, from 80,000,000 B.C. to 2213, to swirl around a living room -- a setting that’s intimate but not too intimate -- is particularly moving.
Hearing Revolutionary War-era sons quibbling with their fathers over politics reminds us of how permanent some facets of humanity are. McGuire does this in a way that doesn’t undermine the dramas that make up our lives, no matter how insignificant they may seem when read aside a thumping dinosaur (the dinosaur gets one panel, and a Halloween party gets several pages).
While McGuire’s original panels were inventive in their own right –- separate scenes set in different eras would take up flat space within a single image of the room, removing chronology from the representation of time –- the book format is even more impressive. Turning its pages doesn’t thrust you forward or backward, but just elsewhere. The result is a tenderly deconstructed flip book that’s worth reading if only for its pleasant depictions of the near future.- Maddie Crum
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Peur(s) du Noir
An extract of film Peur(s) du Noir 'Fear(s) of the Dark' directed by Richard McGuire
An animated short film about a microscopic wolf, designed and directed by Richard McGuire.
Based on the comic strip "Here" by Richard McGuire, RAW Comics V2 #1.
What if it were possible to jump forward and backward in time to find out what happened at a certain place in the past or what will happen there in the future? Where are the boundaries of the unity of time, place and action, and what do images, objects and dates—and what do we—have to do with them?
From January 30 to September 11, 2016, in the exhibition TimeSpace: After "Here" by Richard McGuire, the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt will address itself to elementary questions concerning our relationship to time and space. It will thus take up the thread spun in the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire, an American illustrator and one of the most famous comic avant-gardists—a work that, in fascinating manner, plays with the dissolution of the unity of time, place and action.
Here by Richard McGuire
With the original six-page version of the comic Here, published in 1989, McGuire sparked a true comic revolution. Like that work, the 300-page graphic novel Here of 2014 is based on brilliant pictorial architecture that cleverly and effectively expands the narrative possibilities of pictorial storytelling by way of the comic. In the ever-same "Here" of an ordinary living room corner, McGuire introduces temporal insertions into a constantly changing "Now." Within a given panel, he allows fragments of the past to intrude and fragments of the future to flash past, thus unfolding entire human lives as if in fast motion. From the origins of the world to a distant, unknown future, epochal moments in the history of the earth and mankind pass by this place and combine with scenes of everyday life.
McGuire’s room from the graphic novel in the fourth dimension
McGuire’s room will constitute the focal point of the exhibition as a space in which visitors of all ages can move about, actively change the scenery and become characters in the story Here—but also become its storyteller. Just as ever-different associations come about between the pictures and words scattered through the book Here when it is opened to a random page, the exhibition will also offer scope for creativity within which every visitor can assign the images and objects in the room his or her own very personal meaning in the process of actively changing them.
Objects from the museum collections in TimeSpace
In the graphic novel, the course of time is mirrored not only in the coming and going of generations of occupants and in changing landscapes and atmospheres, but also in the emergence and disappearance of the room itself. Here uses graphic means to assign the redesign of this living room special significance by way of changing furnishings and interior decorations over entire epochs. In the exhibition, it is historical furniture, objects and accessories from the museum collections—complete with the passing of time they represent—that enhance the McGuirean room with a series of domestic settings dating from many different eras.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/10231/timespace-after-here-by-richard-mcguire/
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