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All times, one place, and all at once: Time

Shuffling in Richard McGuire’s “Here”

and Here

Arkadiusz Misztal

Abstract

Published in 1989, Richard McGuire’s black-and-white strip has come to be regarded as a game changer that revolutionized narrative possibilities of graphic fiction. In the deceptively modest layout of the strip, McGuire created a multidimensional zone of small moments projected against the long horizon. The strip covers six pages of six panels each, but beginning with the fifth panel the reader encounters year-labeled “windows” of time that float freely into each frame of action. This frame-within-frame layout encourages re-reading and flipping back and forth between the panels. Instead of linear progression, “Here” conflates time and space to generate multiple dimensionalities that become simultaneously present. With the focus centered on the dynamics of simultaneity, this paper examines the framing devices and narrative strategies which introduce multiple and overlapping temporalities by means of visual and verbal juxtapositions. Subsequently, it discusses the interactive ebook edition of Here, which as I argue, enhances the time-bending quality of the original script and explores the digital mobility of post-Cartesian cyberspace and time.

Keywords

narrative, graphic fiction, simultaneity, window, frame, interactive digital media

Résumé

Publiée en 1989, la bande dessinée en noir et blanc de Richard McGuire est aujourd’hui considérée comme un jalon qui a révolutionné les possibilités narratives du roman graphique. Avec sa mise en page faussement modeste, McGuire a créé une zone pluridimensionelle où de petits moments sont projetés sur un horizon plus large. La bande dessinée couvre six pages de six cases chacune, mais le lecteur rencontre au début de la cinquième case des « fenêtres » temporelles correspondant à des années qui flottent librement dans chaque ensemble d’action. Au lieu de suivre une progression linéaire, « Here » confond les espaces temps et multiplie les dimensions qui deviennent simultanément présentes. En se concentrant sur la dynamique de la simultanéité, cet article analyse les dispositifs de cadrage et les stratégies narratives qui créent des temporalités multiples et stratifiées au moyen de juxtapositions visuelles et verbales. Il en vient ainsi à examiner la version interactive de Here en ebook, qui, selon nous, améliore la qualité du jeu temporel du script original et explore la mobilité digitale d’un espace temps numérique post-cartésien.

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Published in the 1989 comics anthology magazine RAW, Richard McGuire’s black-and-white strip about “a living room in which the present is locked in a constant conversation with the past and the future” (J. Smith 54) has come to be regarded as a game changer that revolutionized the narrative possibilities of graphic fiction. The strip made a great impression on a young student of painting at the University of Texas, Chris Ware, who in the years to come would create the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). Reminiscing about his first encounter with “Here” in an article published in The Guardian, Ware confessed that the comics simply blew his mind by making him aware of how time extends backward and forward infinitely while preserving “a sense of all the biggest of small moments in between” (Ware). He also came to realize that this bland, and even homey, strip consisting of a mere 36 panels “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” (Ware). Oddly enough, McGuire did not immediately capitalize on the success of “Here”. It seems that he left it to others to explore the possibilities of this new visual dimension, while he occupied himself with writing children’s books, designing toys, drawing covers for The New Yorker and playing bass in Liquid Liquid, a New York no wave band. It was only 15 years later that he published the colorized and greatly expanded version of “Here” as his first graphic novel under the same title, Here (2014). The book was received enthusiastically both by reviewers and his fellow comic book artists. Art Spiegelman (whose lecture McGuire attended as a student) put it succinctly, writing that if all comics are somehow the sheet music of time, then McGuire’s book is “a symphony” (qtd. in Cooke). Dwight Garner from The New York Times, to give another example, was also impressed how McGuire can bend time in the corner of a single room and called the book “a symphonic work about transience and loss, related in artwork that has some of Edward Hopper’s moody, light-struck realism” (Garner). Comprising 304 pages of interconnected and overlapping storylines, the novel spans thousand of years of American life, moving back and forth in time but preserving a single vantage point, a corner of the living room, set in (more or less) McGuire’s childhood home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Reading Here is a truly dynamic experience as McGuire’s narrative continuously flips back and forth in time. Some of the panels go back as far as primordial eras when dinosaurs roamed the earth, while others spring forward to a distant future when humanity no longer exists. The in-between is filled with hundreds of moments capturing the lives of Native Americans, European settlers, American families from different centuries and decades, all of these moments taking place in the space between a cozy fireplace and a window. As Ware puts it, the book is “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” (Ware). Echoing Spiegelman, Ware concludes his commentary on Here with a musical analogy: if the original 1989 strip was a piano sonata, then the 2014 book is a symphony (ibid).

In this paper I will concentrate first, on McGuire’s “graphic sonata” as it contains, in my view, the blueprint of his later work. With my focus centered on the dynamics of visual simultaneity and temporal multi-layeredness, I will compare the strip with the interactive ebook edition from 2015, in which the reader encounters not only animated gifs but also clickable panels. By making the dates and panels interactive, the ebook enhances the time shuffling quality of the original script and explores the digital mobility and fluidity of post-Cartesian cyberspace and time in its effort to move beyond the two-dimensional architecture of the comics’ page. Drawing on Anne Friedberg’s study, I will argue that much of the originality and appeal of McGuire’s work lies in its ability to reveal and actualize the possibilities of our contemporary vernacular system of visuality based on multiplicity and simultaneity.

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Framing Time(s)

In Comics and Sequential Art (2008) Will Eisner regards timing as an essential element in visual narratives and contends that critical to their success is the ability to convey time. Out of all the tools that comic book artists have at their disposal, the panel, comic’s most basic icon, stands out as it usually acts as a general indicator that space or time are being divided. “Comics panels”, Scott McCloud writes, “fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” (67). The task of connecting these moments is left up to the reader, who mentally constructs a continuous, unified reality by virtue of what McCloud calls “closure”, the ability to imagine the actions which are not drawn, but which take place in the gutter, the blank space between panels: “Comics ask the mind to work as a sort of in-betweener – filling in the gaps between panels as an animator might” (88). Generally speaking, time can be controlled not only through the content of panels, but one can also indicate the passage of time by subtracting or adding more panels, changing their shape, widening the space between panels, etc. The artist takes advantage of the fact that “short” and “long” in comics can refer either to the first or the fourth dimension respectively. As the reader’s eyes move through space, they are also moving through time, but, as McCloud notes, we just don’t know how much.

Fig.1 from “Here”, used by permission.

However, this is not the case with McGuire’s “Here” where the panels are dated. In the deceptively modest layout of the strip, McGuire created a multidimensional zone of small moments projected against a long horizon that extends from 500, 957, 406, 073 B.C. to 2033 A.D. The strip covers six pages of six panels each, but beginning with the fifth panel the reader encounters “windows” of time labeled with a year that

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float freely into each frame of action. In this way, “McGuire switches back and forth between years in successive panels, presenting us with as many as four different time portals in a single panel” (Hancock). “Here” departs from the traditional up-down and left-right reading of comic strips by adding, to use Ware’s phrase, “a third ‘in-and-out’ direction of overlapping palimpsests of framed historical space” (Greenberg). This poses a challenge to the reader who cannot go on with the assumption that time passes in linear, unidirectional fashion, as it usually does in comic strips.

“Here” thus runs somewhat counter to McCloud’s “closure theory” that too strictly aligns the question of time in comics with a linear connection between two subsequent panels in the gutter.52 What appears to be far more important for the narrative dimension of “Here” and other graphic fiction is not so much space between panels as how they relate to one another. Panels in a strip can be organized in various ways: horizontally, vertically, or a combination of both. They can be stacked or superimposed on each other. The page as a geometrical shape and other forms of layout can also contribute to panel relations. The page of a comic is therefore, as Thierry Groensteen has suggested, best approached as a field where images enter into dialogue with each other in praesentia (147). Apart from the linear transition between two immediately juxtaposed panels, comics ask us to consider translinear interrelations between panels in different parts of the page. They often require that reading in sequence is complemented by ‘tabular’ reading,53 or to use Gérard Genette’s expression, “a global and synchronic look” across the page (qtd. in Mikkonen 33).

In “Here” the points of contact between panels are clearly not merely sequential. Instead of linear progression, “Here” conflates time and space to generate multiple dimensionalities that become simultaneously present. The past is no longer to the reader’s left and the future to the reader’s right. Through its unique composition, McGuire’s work creates its own logic of spatial connectivity (Mikkonen 46): it slices space “into pictures, and then shuffles it all up—past, present, and future hopelessly intermingled— taking time out of page and placing it squarely back into the consciousness and more importantly, the control of the reader” (Ware 6). One must work out a new relation between “now” and “then” as they not only coincide, but also coexist in the strip. The “yearly” time stamps, as well as other time props and cues, verbal and graphical, are explicit, but they are not temporally prescriptive. While they guide the reader as he or she moves in space and time, they do not turn panels into “quasi-punctual” units of time. As Kai Mikkonen puts it, “the embedded frames, all identified by a year, depict one point in space, which is a corner of a room in the twentieth and the twenty-first century, thus illustrating from this fixed point the passing of time both towards the future and the past” (46). As the shuffling and flipping back and forth overrides their initial fixity, the panels operate more as slices of duration rather than points in time.

Obviously McGuire was not the first one to explore the potentials of visual simultaneity that comics and graphic novels offer in rendering time’s passage and its experience. In his comprehensive survey of contemporary American graphic fiction, Jared Gardner considers “Here” as a prime example of the historical turn in the contemporary US graphic narrative and argues that McGuire takes full advantage of comics’ specific abilities to “describe not only time and space but the history of a space” (171). Through its engagement with traces of the past as they impinge on the present and the future, “Here” “visualizes and reactivates history in unique ways” (172), combining the personal and subjective with the cosmic and collective perspectives on places as they change in time. McGuire’s work can thus be seen as revisiting and expanding on the questions that animated American underground comics of the previous generation,

52

McCloud’s understanding of closure is very broad ranging, but paradoxically this perspective imposes limits on the question of time in comics by overemphasizing the diegetic function of gutter. For a well-balanced discussion of the importance of gutter in the context of panel and page layout of the graphic novel, see Baetens and Frey, ch. 5.

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especially the work of Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. Among the many works that share strong affinities with “Here”, Gardner singles out Alan Moore’s series “Watchmen”, created in collaboration with David Gibbons. “Watchmen” was published as a limited series by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987, and collected in 1987, two years after McGuire’s “Here” appeared in the RAW magazine. The common ground that Moore and McGuire seem to share is the inclination to explore time in graphic narratives as the fourth dimension and to look into a consciousness of, what Bernard and Carter call, “simultaneous being” (para. 12). One of the best examples of rendering this consciousness is the character developed by Moore: Dr. Manhattan, who through an accident in an “Intrinsic Field Subtractor” gains godlike powers not only over matter but also over time. Living in a kind of quantum universe, Dr. Manhattan is immortal and continuously aware of the past, present and future. In Chapter Four of Watchmen, Manhattan, who gradually loses touch with his humanity, exiles himself to Mars to contemplate his origin and in a series of flashbacks goes back to moments before the atomic accident that turned him into a superhero.54 The first panel shows Dr. Manhattan’s hand holding a photograph of himself and his ex-girlfriend Janey Slater, a fellow researcher at the Gila Flats test base. Manhattan’s captions read, “The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959” (Moore 1). The next panel zooms in on the photograph lying on the red Martian terrain, between two footprints that suggest that Manhattan has dropped the photo and wandered off. This is confirmed by the next caption: “In twelve seconds time, I drop the photograph to the sand at my feet, walking away. It’s already lying there, twelve seconds into the future” (Moore 2). The reader finds the photo back in Manhattan’s hand in the next panel as Manhattan admits that he “found it in a derelict bar at the Gila Flats test base, twenty-seven hours ago.” The next panel shows Manhattan at the derelict bar; looking at the photo he notes, “It’s still there, twenty-seven hours into past, in its frame, in the darkened room. I'm still there looking at it” (2). As Gardner points out, Dr. Manhattan, “capable of taking in past, present, and future in a glance, of moving back and forward between them effortlessly, even of making choices in the gaps between slivers of time […]” (Gardner 188), sees and makes sense of time much in the same ways as a comics reader does as he or she alternates between fixation on individual panels and the global look that the page layout offers. This alternation moves beyond, what Groensteen describes as “restricted arthrology” (22)—the localized meaning-making process generated by the panel by panel sequence and creates instead meaningful connections across the spatio-temporal field of the page. Commenting on this chapter of Watchmen, Bernard and Carter call it “a tour-de-force in comics storytelling” (Bernard and Carter para. 17) as it takes full advantage of the capacities offered by the visual narratives and presents this sequence as an exceptional experience that compellingly engages the reader.

As the audience ingests the comics page as a whole, they are with Dr. Manhattan every step of the way. When the setting turns back to Manhattan at the derelict bar, the reader is there with him, just as the reader is, at the same time, back on Mars with him. After all, while observing the panel that shows Manhattan in the bar, the panel showing Manhattan on Mars is still within eyeshot. This all combines with the reader’s actual space to bridge dimensional relations. (Bernard and Carter para. 18)

Somewhat contentiously Bernard and Carter observe that “the sequence would be of little note if played out in a novel or film” as these mediums must resort to more obtrusive techniques (such as ruptures in the text, cross-cutting or split screen) to manipulate the space-time continuum and generate this kind of simultaneity. If the bridging of time and space in comics is virtually seamless, then “[t]he only way a film can achieve the

54Since DC Comics refused to grant the permission to use images from Watchmen, in what follows I provide a short description of the sequence of panels in question.

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same fourth dimensional effect [is] through the usage of split screen, an effect that takes the audience out of the film and is very distracting and self-aware” (para.18).

Digital Mobility and Time Shuffling

This is, obviously, not to say that “Here”, with its temporal plasticity, cannot be successfully transported to another medium. A case in point is the digital version of Here, which in a way returns to, and expands upon, the original concept behind the 1989 strip. As McGuire admitted in an interview, the idea of free-floating time frames in his strip is based on the computer operating system, Windows that he came in contact with in the late 80s.55 This idea was further refined in the digital edition of Here by making the graphic narrative truly interactive. In the ebook version, “where time and space are nothing but finite” (McGuire 1), the reader encounters not only animated gifs but also clickable panels, which are not connected to the backgrounds. The reader can shuffle pages by clicking the date or can follow a single story by clicking through panels. By making the dates and panels interactive, the ebook encourages the reader to rearrange and reorganize the order of the pages, and thus create new combinations and connections.

Fig. 2 from the interactive digital edition of Here, used by permission.

Both “Here” and Here explore the possibilities of the computer screen56 and its graphical interface, and in a more general sense they narrate their stories using a contemporary visual syntax based on multiplicity and

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Windows 1.0, developed as a graphical operating environment for IBM PCs, made its debut in 1985. Instead of typing MS-DOS commands, the user could point and click to access the windows. Its successor, Windows 2.0, released two years later, offered more elegant and easier to use interface. It added keyboard shortcuts, desktop icons, and resizable, overlapping windows. Windows 2.0 came bundled with Microsoft’s Word and Excel graphical applications, which competed against the text-based interfaces of then-reigning competitors WordPerfect and Lotus.

56

McCloud also acknowledges these possibilities for constructing an interactive graphic narrative and points out “the monitor which so often acts as a page – may also act as a window” (Reinventing Comics 222).

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simultaneity. The use of multiple frames has been increasingly common in visual media since modernity but, as Anne Friedman has argued, the digital window-based interface has accelerated the transition “from the singular frame of perspective to the multiplicity of windows within windows, frames within frames, screens within screens” and contributed to the remaking of the contemporary visual syntax (8). The multiple-window format has become a vernacular system of visuality which substitutes the single viewpoint with multiple and fractured modes of perception.57

Commenting on the graphic user interface (GUI) developed by Microsoft, Friedman observes that “the ‘windows’ trope is emblematic of the collapse of the single viewpoint; it relies on the model of a window that we don’t see through, windows that instead overlap and obscure, and are resizable and movable” (229). The vernacular ‘space’ of these windows “has more in common with surfaces of cubism—frontality, suppression of depth, overlapping layers—than with the extended depth of Renaissance perspective” (Friedberg 3). The new “square horizon” of the (computer) screen, to use Paul Virilio’s phrase, has to a great extent replaced the horizon line of Quattrocento perspective.58 As Friedman points out,

the graphical user interface (GUI) introduced an entirely new visual system—a text or image in one ‘window’ meets other texts or images in other ‘windows’ on the same screen. Above, below, ahead, and behind are simultaneous on the computer display, where each element in composition is seen separately with no systematic spatial relationship between them.” (Friedberg 2)

The virtual mobilities of GUI affect not only the spatial components of the framed images but also the time architecture of the virtual window itself by generating a fractured and disjunctive sense of space and time.59

As a screen-based visual system, the ‘windows’ interface subtly exponentiates what Erwin Panofsky described as the ‘unique and specific possibilities’ of the cinema: the dynamization of space and the spatialization of time. On the computer, we can be two (or more) places at once, in two (or more) time frames, in two (or more) modes of identity, in a fractured post-Cartesian cyberspace, cybertime. (Friedberg 235, italics in original)

This sense of mobility and fluidity characterizes McGuire’s exploration of simultaneity and temporal multi-layeredness in his works. Yet, the time architecture of “Here” and Here differs in significant ways from that of the cinema and the window-based interface. Cinematic projection, which from its early years emphasized the window over the frame, employed the former in a very particular sense, namely as “a one-way window” for the disembodied spectator, creating a “voyeuristic view of a diegetic world that unfolds for us without acknowledging us” (G. Smith 226). Comics, in contrast, make use of multiple concepts of windows and thus reconfigure time and space in different ways than cinema and other media. The logic of the panel, when used in conjunction with other elements of the page layout, can introduce diversified perspectival systems in

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In a similar vein Manovich and Bolter and Grusin have argued that the interactive screen has become a dominant cultural paradigm and as such a powerful factor capable of radically reshaping our visual sensibilities and aesthetics. Needless to say, this reshaping has been especially prominent in the area of graphic fiction. In Reinventing Comics (2000) Scott McCloud predicted that in the 21st century the digital through its infinite canvas and interactive nature will provide a perfect environment in which

“comic’ conceptual DNA [will] grow in its new dish” (223). The digital version of Here is a great example of this growth. For a detailed and comprehensive discussion of the strong equivalences between comics and interactive media, see Gardner.

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See Virilio 15. It is worth noting that Virilio’s position is much more radical than Friedman’s evaluation of the new visual technologies. The loss of the horizon line of Renaissance perspective and the emergence of cyber perspective produce a stereo-reality effect. Our current stereo-reality, for Virilio, is made up of two overlapping channels: “the actual stereo-reality of immediate appearances” and the virtual reality of “media trans-appearances”. Unlike stereoscopy or stereophony that distinguishes left from right, bass from treble, stereo-reality affects a split that distorts and diminishes our perceptual depth of field leading to what Virilio calls “a fundamental loss of orientation” in our dealings with the world and the other.

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panels, which enables a smooth alternation between the more two-dimensional logic of the frame and the three-dimensional aspect of the window (G. Smith 231). Furthermore, comics differ from the visual syntax of computer ‘windows’ with respect to panel relations. While computer ‘windows’ can be ‘open’ at the same time and easily resized and moved on the screen, “they rarely serve, as the art historical double-slide projection did, as a means for comparative analysis” (Friedman 231). In other words, the spatial proximity of multiple windows is not meant to introduce a mutual sense of relation. The points of contact between them are, at best, accidental: “The multiple framed images of Muybridge (seen in sequence) and the silkscreen multiples of Andy Warhol (seen in repetition) contained images that exist in relation to each other, whereas the ‘windows’ of the computer may not” (Friedberg 193). The computer windows when used in conjunction with other windows, Smith notes, “allow us to multitask among several different activities and views […] creating a media environment that is multiply fractured, not singularly arresting” (227). In this environment the multiple windows “are being monitored rather than being immersive” (227).

In constructing his narrative McGuire follows Muybridge and Warhol in exploring the tension between stillness and motion, between single and multiple views.60 McGuire is well aware that comics as a sequence of not-indexical panels can activate the mobile concepts of frame and window in ways that are different from photography or cinema.61 Accordingly he makes full use of comics’ specific possibilities for both narrative configuration and visual reconfiguration of time and space. The comics’ direct relationship between layout and narrative structure enables McGuire to arrange his “windows” in such a way that they form multiple (and often unexpected) interconnections with each other. The sparse visual language, brief dialogues and terse phrases (most of them referring to the present) compel the reader to formulate links and connect the images. For instance, the year labels within the panels help the reader to piece together the jumbled chronology of Billy’s life, the central figure of the strip, who is born on the first page, grows up in the house, leaves and visits his childhood home, and eventually dies. Yet in many panels the nature and character of the relationships resulting from the spatial proximity are not always immediately obvious. The visual effects created by proximity, as Hancock points out, contribute to the nonlinearity of McGuire’s narrative.

Fig. 3 from “Here”, used by permission.

60 It needs to be noted that the relations between the comics panel and chronophotographic shot are much more complex than

“straight borrowings”. While comics aesthetics were shaped by Muybridge and Marey’s experiments in chronophotography and inherited its techniques, the new codes and techniques were frequently deployed, as Scott Bukatman argues, to parodic effect (64) as the comics aimed to upset “the rationalist impulse to map the moving body’s navigation of graphed space” (37) by introducing its own spatiotemporal illogics.

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Consider, for example, the transition from panel 21 in which a boy plays with a toy dinosaur to the next one, which presents the toy’s real-life counterpart from some 100 million years earlier and a floating inset window from 1968 in which a character seems to laugh at McGuire’s joke. This is one of many instances in which McGuire’s visual narrative encourages time shuffling, which counters chronological development of the plot by visual and, to a lesser degree, verbal juxtapositions. The reader can essentially read the strip (and the book) almost in any order and each time can come away with a new understanding of the story.62

In McGuire’s work, both in the strip and the book, spatial contiguity does not generate sequential continuity but continually calls into question the seemingly straightforward connection between “a before” and “an after”. By encouraging a constant reshuffling, McGuire’s narrative insistently prompts the reader to move beyond the immediate panel sequence and consider simultaneous relationships among the panels. In this imaginative exploration of the hiatus between images, the reader overcomes the stasis of a panel by leaping both forward and backward in time. This leaping is never reduced to a random oscillation between small moments. Neither does it merely turn “here” into “now”. Instead it reveals our “heresein” in its specific temporal horizon defined by locality and interiority.63 “Here” and Here thus illustrate how my being always and irrevocably here “entails also the creation of a double temporal horizon (‘backward’ and ‘forward’) within which I am the permanently moving now” (Castoriadis 325).

In brief, McGuire’s work reveals the fluidity of time and our relationship to it.64 In doing so, Ware contends, it introduces a perspective that is “‘above’ all human experience [of time]” (Ware 6). The narrative is a multidimensional zone of small mundane moments projected against the long horizon that transcends the time-span of communities, cultures and civilizations. And yet strangely enough, when compared with the massive sweep of time, these small moments, even the most trivial ones, can feel deeply immersive and overwhelmingly personal. Perhaps this is so, because in McGuire’s hands the spatial deictic referent “here” becomes temporally charged as the reader plunges into a moment-by-moment meditation on change and “un-change”. In our daily interactions deictic markers are often accompanied by bodily gestures that complement, clarify or emphasize their meaning. McGuire’s narrative seems to be animated by somewhat different kinds of gestures, gestures that in acknowledging our embodied condition disclose, I believe, a sense of immobility that we experience when forming in our minds relationships with outer physical reality. Reflecting on the passing of time we find ourselves immobilized, as if we were motionless, always at the same point, at the same “here” unable to actualize the type of simultaneity and instantaneity available to us in perception and thinking. By engaging our imagination, McGuire’s work shows that this simultaneity can be grasped only in sections or moments that defy fixation—one moment passing into another.

Credits and Permissions: All images © Richard McGuire, 1989, 2014, 2015. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

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It is worth noting that the Polish edition of Here is perhaps most radical in its effort to recreate the time shuffling dynamics. Inspired by Chris Ware’s Building Stories, it abandons the traditional book-binding format and offers a box containing 154 non-paginated sheets stacked one on top of another. Instead of reading from cover to cover, the reader is expected to rearrange the sheets as he or she tries out new possible combinations and patterns.

63

I am grateful to Fredrick Turner for bringing this point to my attention in his stimulating presentation “Metric and Variation: The Tempo of Poetry, the Poetry of Time” delivered at the 2019 ISST conference in Los Angeles.

64 A seed for “Here” could have been planted in his mind, McGuire suggests, “when posing with his siblings for a Christmastime

group portrait each year. The ritual impressed upon him the cyclical nature of human affairs and the irretrievability of the past” (J. Smith 55).

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Works Cited

Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015.

Bernard, Mark and James Bucky Carter. “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Confronting the Fourth Dimension”. ImageTexT, vol.1, no.2, 2004, pp. 1-27.

Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.

Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. University of California Press, 2012.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. “Radical imagination and the social instituting imaginary.” The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 319-337.

Cooke, Rachel. “Here by Richard McGuire review – an exquisitely drawn ecological warning.” The Guardian, 21 Dec 2014, www.theguardian.com. Accessed 17 May 2019.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices From the Legendary Cartoonist. W.W. Norton, 2008.

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. MIT Press, 2006.

Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012.

Garner, Dwight. “While Stuck in a Corner, an Artist Bends Time.” The New York Times, 23 Dec 2014, nytimes.com. Accessed 15 June 2019.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Hancock, Michael W. “Storytelling in Comics: Who, When, and Where in ‘Here’.” Comics and Graphic Novels, no. 2, 2013, http://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/comics/2. Accessed 14 Dec 2018.

Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. HarperEdge, 1997.

Manovich, Lev. Language of New Media. MIT, 2002. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. Paradox Press, 2000. ---. Understanding Comics. HarperPerennial, 1994.

McGuire, Richard. “Here”. RAW, vol. 2, no. 1, 1989, pp. 69-74. ---. Here. Hamish Hilton, 2014.

---, Here Interactive. Penguin, 2015, itunes.apple.com/us/book/here. Accessed 4 May 2016. Mikkonen, Kai. The Narratology of Comic Art. Routledge, 2017.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen 4. DC Comics, 1986, pp. 1-28.

Pedler, Martyn. “‘3X2(9YZ)4A’”: Stasis and Speed in Contemporary Superhero Comics.” Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative, edited by Jake Jakaitis and James F. Wurtz, McFarland & Company, 2012, pp. 177-187.

Smith, Greg M. “Comics in the Intersecting Histories of the Window, the Frame, and the Panel”. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 219–238.

Smith, Joel. “From Here to Here Richard McGuire Makes a Book.” Five Dials, vol. 35, 2014, pp. 54-55. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2000.

Ware, Chris. “Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire – a game-changing graphic Novel.” The Guardian, 17 Dec 2015, www.theguardian.com. Accessed 16 May 2017.

---. “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’: A Grateful Appreciation” Comic Art, vol. 8, 2006, pp. 5-7.

Arkadiusz Misztal is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. His

research and teaching interests focus on contemporary American fiction, narrative theory, and the philosophy of time.

Figure

Fig. 2 from the interactive digital edition of Here, used by permission.
Fig. 3 from “Here”, used by permission.

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