Here

Here (2014) is a graphic novel by American artist and illustrator Richard McGuire. Beginning in the corner of a suburban New Jersey living room in the 1950s, every page of the novel is located in the same spot: however, the moment in time at which the room is depicted varies from 3,000,500,000 BC to 10,175 AD. Within each larger panel, smaller, super-imposed panels depict the room in different moments, so that, for example, a catastrophic flood in 2030 takes place alongside a mirror falling from the wall in the 1990s.

The novel began life as a six-page graphic short, published in 1989 in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s influential avant-garde comics magazine RAW. McGuire’s panels-within-panels concept was inspired by Microsoft Windows, then just four years old. The simple black-and-white short, credited with revolutionizing the possibilities of the form, has been a major influence on subsequent generations of cartoonists. McGuire worked on the follow-up novel for almost 15 years.

The opening of the novel jumps around within the 20th century, depicting moments from 1957, 1942, and 2007. On page 8, a pink lady in a pink outfit has the page almost to herself: she walks into her pink living room, asking herself, “Hmm…Now why did I come in here again?” Opposite her, the natural world makes its first quiet intrusion: a small grey square, labeled “1999,” contains a stalking cat.



On the next page, we find ourselves in 1623. A snowy forest contains no sign of human habitation. Overlaid on this bleak scene are the woman from 1957 and the cat from 1999, now licking its paw.

Gradually the novel’s many narratives expand and unwind. We catch glimpses of dinosaurs lumbering through a desert, and enormous prehistoric ox-like creatures grazing in a primeval forest. Ice arrives and recedes. Sometimes this patch of land is a lake, sometimes a forest, a swamp, a glacier.

In 1352, a beautiful Lenni Lenape woman dives into a pool. A young man follows her. They are looking for a private place to make love. When they find it, their intimacy is interrupted—for us, but not for them—by a bird crashing through the window of a house built hundreds of years later.



We witness the arrival of Dutch explorers and English settlers, including the ancestors of Benjamin Franklin. They clear land and build a palatial home, where on the eve of the Revolution, Franklin and his loyalist son argue about politics. At the climax of their argument, McGuire throws open a panel showing the year 10,175 AD—in which a large, unrecognizable marsupial stalks across a barren wasteland, eyeing the reader with unmistakable intelligence.

Our vantage point is first enclosed by a house in 1907—we see it go up board-by-board. From then on, it is a living room for a succession of families. Insofar as the novel has a protagonist, it is probably “William,” whose pregnant mother excitedly announces, “It’s time” in 1957 (McGuire’s own birth year). We see his parents bring him home, and we see him grow up in the house. In 2015, now aging, he visits the house—now occupied by another young couple—asking to look around. In 2027, the young couple reads William’s obituary in the local paper. In another panel, the wife, now heavily pregnant, announces, “It’s time!”

These chronological narratives play out alongside—and sometimes through— each other, to create miniature juxtapositions that recontextualize the events of the characters’ lives. As sulphuric-looking clouds gather in 3 million B.C., an artist sets out his canvas in the sun in 1873. While a man argues with his aging father in 2005, an insect buzzes past in 2006.



Some of these juxtapositions are slyly humorous. As children in 1952 demand a password of their mother before she can enter their fort, a photographer in 1990 demands, “Say cheese!”

Many of them weave momentary, fragmented narratives that cut across time. One spread connects five people in five different eras in five different stages of passionate love affairs. In another, three girls dance unselfconsciously—one in 1932, one in 1993, and another in 2014, while in 1964, an older woman plays the piano.

As the novel unfolds, more glimpses of the future creep in. We learn that in the 2100s the house is flooded, and for decades all we can see is water. By the 2300s, tour-guides are using unrecognizable computer technology to show tourists a virtual facsimile of the city that used to stand in what are now wetlands. By the 2400s, some kind of apocalyptic event has taken place. In the year 22,175, dinosaur-like creatures thrive in a tropical swamp.



Again and again, McGuire underscores the relative smallness and insignificance of human life in the timescales of the natural world. As well as a flood, fire destroys the house (twice). In 1999, a family sits around the TV set as a program explains that the death of the Sun will inevitably destroy the Earth.

In the novel’s final panels, the woman in pink reappears, still in 1957, searching the room for something—perhaps for the reason she came in in the first place.