Each image in Here uses windows to show what happened in that space throughout history, and what could happen in the future. (Expand gallery to fullscreen for the best experience.) courtesy Pantheon Books
Each image in Here uses windows to show what happened in that space throughout history, and what could happen in the future. (Expand gallery to fullscreen for the best experience.)
Here takes place in one corner of one room. courtesy Pantheon Books
Here takes place in one corner of one room.
The far corner of the room falls in the book's gutter. courtesy Pantheon Books
The far corner of the room falls in the book's gutter.
The color schemes of various images help readers follow storylines and time periods. courtesy Pantheon Books
The color schemes of various images help readers follow storylines and time periods.
Furniture, clothing, hairstyles, and language all play a role in creating distinct time periods across a singular space. courtesy Pantheon Books
Furniture, clothing, hairstyles, and language all play a role in creating distinct time periods across a singular space.
The "here" of Here could be anywhere, but McGuire used his childhood home in New Jersey as the basis for the book's historical research. courtesy Pantheon Books
The "here" of Here could be anywhere, but McGuire used his childhood home in New Jersey as the basis for the book's historical research.
After attending a lecture by Art Spiegelman in the late 1980s, McGuire wrote a comic strip named "Here" in 1989 that played with the idea of one space throughout time. Inspired by the then-new concept of computer "windows," McGuire developed the panels-within-panels concept that would become essential to his book. courtesy Pantheon Books
After attending a lecture by Art Spiegelman in the late 1980s, McGuire wrote a comic strip named "Here" in 1989 that played with the idea of one space throughout time. Inspired by the then-new concept of computer "windows," McGuire developed the panels-within-panels concept that would become essential to his book.
Most pages in Here aren't limited to one time period. courtesy Pantheon Books
Most pages in Here aren't limited to one time period.
Readers can flip through the book and look at the images in any order and come away with a new understanding of the story each time. courtesy Pantheon Books
Readers can flip through the book and look at the images in any order and come away with a new understanding of the story each time.
A dinosaur may have once snacked where you’re sitting. A founding father may have argued for freedom, right where you stand. Fifty years from now? It could be robots napping in your bed, not you. Slow down the clock and you might find yourself thinking about yesterday, last week, tomorrow and today—we know we do. These very notions—about the fluidity of time and our relationship to it—are at the center of artist Richard McGuire’s charming new graphic novel, Here.
With a cozy fireplace on one end and a window on the other, Here takes place in one corner of one room. Within those walls, we watch as couples quarrel, children play, a cat wanders, and a dinosaur roams. The location never changes, but the clock does—giving snapshots from millions of years ago to decades into the future. Most pages aren’t limited to one time period, and panels within panels allow the reader to cut through space to see what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. It is, to say the least, awesome.
WIRED talked with McGuire about his inspiration for his beautiful book, out today, and the hidden secrets in its pages. “Ultimately, it’s about impermanence,” McGuire explains. That’s a funny summation of a piece of work that started as a comic strip in 1989 and has remained relevant and beloved ever since. Here’s everything you need to know to get into Here.
The Book Draws From the Artist’s Childhood Memories, Dreams, and Family Life
After the death of his parents, McGuire packed up his family’s home. He found stacks of photos and unearthed old memories, which made their way into the book. “My dad took the same photo of us every year in the same spot as we grew up,” McGuire says.
Sound familiar? McGuire found that lots of families have many of the same rituals—photographs, holidays, movie nights. “All the photos of family stuff all look the same,” he says. People who pass through the panels may be McGuire’s aunts or uncles, but he doesn’t think it matters; the story, the family, the scenes are universal. The reader brings his or her own dreams and memories of what it means to be home. McGuire, nonetheless, has snuck little Easter eggs into the book. The opening scene, for example, is the year he was born.
Here Was Developed from McGuire’s Hugely Influential 1989 Comic Strip in RAW
After attending a lecture by Art Spiegelman in the late 1980s, McGuire wrote a comic strip that played with the idea of one space throughout time. Inspired by the then-new concept of computer “windows,” McGuire developed the panels-within-panels concept that would become essential to his book. The strip, named “Here,” ran in Volume 2 of RAW magazine, the avant-garde comics anthology run by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. “It was very simple,” Mouly says of the original comic. “It was at the core of what we were interested in, and it hadn’t been done before.”
The cover of Here. courtesy Pantheon Books
The impact was immediate. “Richard’s work had a profound, life-changing influence on me,” comic book artist Chris Ware says. “It opened up a completely new avenue of expression for visual storytelling by adding to the familiar left-to-right and up-and-down reading of comics a third ‘in-and-out’ direction of overlapping palimpsests of framed historical space.” Readers could read the strip, like the now full-fledged book, in—essentially—any order and come away with a new understanding of the story.
Ben Franklin Was Here. (So Were Native Americans, Forests, and Dinosaurs.)
There’s a history to every place, which McGuire felt he couldn’t ignore. The “here” itself could be anywhere, sure, but McGuire used his childhood home in New Jersey as the basis for the book’s historical research. Growing up he had heard that the house across the street from his was somehow linked to Ben Franklin. He found that Franklin’s son had, in fact, lived there—his father visited on occasion, but their relationship was strained by the son’s loyalty to King George.
McGuire also learned that Native Americans had lived near his home, which was not a house, but a forest at the time. These historical moments make an entrance in the book, but they’re no more important to the narrative than a Halloween party years later, or a lazy afternoon. “We’re all passing through and everyone is playing their part,” McGuire says. “The Ben Franklin thing too—it’s just another little blip in the scope of things.”
Colors, Styles, and a Dab of Nostalgia Help Mark the Years
The original strip in RAW was simple, black and white, pen and ink. “I felt like I had to draw this generic style for people to follow me. It had to be like an owner’s manual or something,” McGuire says. For the book, however, he opted to draw with pencils and paint with watercolors—bright reds, yellows, burnt browns, grassy greens, deep blues.
Storylines and time periods have more consistent color schemes (i.e. follow the yellow brick panels), as well, which help the reader track the story. “Even the mediums have a time base,” McGuire says. “Some were done really quickly, and some were meant to be temporary, and then I was seeing them next to each other and they felt like they have different moods or temperatures.” Even furniture, clothing, hairstyles, and language all play a role in creating distinct time periods across a singular space.
Here Uses Its Shape to Help Tell Its Story
In the book, the gutter is the back corner of the room. “It places the reader into the story’s three-dimensional space simply by opening the book itself,” Ware explains. “One could claim that the main character of this book is the corner or space where it all happens, but it’s really the consciousness of the reader that’s at the center of the story.” With this in mind, McGuire at one point considered scrambling the book’s pages for each print, so each reader would get a different copy. Then, he realized that “would be crazy,” he says.
Instead, he let the book be the book, and developed an interactive e-book as well. The physical copy remains the same for each reader, but the e-book lets readers shuffle pages by clicking the date or follow a single story by clicking through panels. “Even if you don’t know specifically what the story is, they have a presence, they have a coherence. It’s like reading a detective story and you have to link those things in your mind,” says Mouly of the book. “Is it comics? Is it a graphic novel? Is it art? Is the e-book the ultimate version? They function as a series of pictures. It’s a work of literature.” Ultimately, whether reading the book or e-book, where the story goes and what it means is up to you.
Here is available today. Check out an excerpt from McGuire’s book in the gallery above.
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