9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought A Theory of “Here” CRITICISM / LEE KONSTANTINOU :: A Theory of Here :: About halfway through Here, the experimental cartoonist Richard McGuire opens a window—well, a panel—onto the year 10,175. This far-future scene is layered atop a larger image that takes place in 1775, somewhere on the east coast of what will become the United States, showing a cryptic conversation about the pending Revolutionary War. By now, we’ve learned how to read Here. McGuire’s book—it would be a mistake to call it, as many have done, a graphic novel—scrambles the normal logic of comics narrative. Instead of creating juxtaposed sequences of panels that together tell a unified story, Here’s pages show the same location in space at different times. The book features a sequence of lushly colored double-page spreads, each one set in a different year (indicated with a tag in the upper-left corner of the page). Smaller panels often hover over the main double-page frame, depicting the same location either before or after the dominant year. Mostly, we observe the corner of a nondescript room, seeing how it stays the same or changes across the years, observing its various human inhabitants at different ages and in different states of health. These panels have, by the midpoint of the book, largely focused on the past and the present; McGuire has rendered times before the house was constructed, has dramatized encounters between the indigenous population and newly arrived settler-colonists, and has even let us see the year 1,009 BCE. We have also already peeked into the house’s future, observing humans who inhabit the year 2016 (residents of this distant future seem very much like us), as well as people using holographic interfaces in the year 2050. So the attentive reader has probably already anticipated that McGuire will show us the ultimate fate of the house—perhaps letting us see far beyond. And he does. But what we see of the year 10,175 is far stranger than we might have expected. http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 1/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought Figure 1: McGuire’s far-future marsupial This unassuming panel, about the size of a playing card, opens onto an animal, a marsupial of some sort, maybe the lovechild of a large possum and a small kangaroo, standing on an empty field. It’s not any animal that exists today, and not an animal we would expect to see in the American northeast. The creature stares straight at us, as if it knows we’re watching, suggesting that it might be more intelligent than your average marsupial. The animal’s confident gaze is http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 2/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought initially unsettling and comes to seem alien precisely because the animal itself is so ordinary, so unthreatening. With this innocuous panel, McGuire opens up a new continent of time, suggesting that the second half of Here will more fully explore the ultimate fate of the house. And again, Here does not disappoint, showing us the house’s frightening destruction by (presumably global- warming-related) flooding, taking us as far forward as the year 22,175, where new dinosaur-like creatures roam the earth. And yet there is something uniquely affecting about this particular marsupial, something about it that is even stranger than the later dinosaur-creatures, something about its haunted eyes that gives us access to the larger, unnerving significance of McGuire’s masterwork. This little animal perfectly illustrates how McGuire uses comics to explore the relationship between time and space. McGuire first published “Here” in 1989 in Raw, an avant-garde comics magazine created by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Only six pages long, the original “Here” electrified the tiny world of experimental comics. It was warmly received by long-established Underground cartoonists like Justin Green and, most importantly, hugely influenced younger cartoonists like Chris Ware. [i] The French comics critic Thierry Groensteen has been extolling its praises for years, writing one of the first analyses of “Here” in 1991. [ii] http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 3/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought Figure 2: A page from McGuire’s 1989 “Here” The 1989 version of “Here” is superficially similar to the book. Each panel features a dominant image of the corner of a room overlaid with smaller panels displaying other images, images of the same room in the past and the future. Like the book, the panel-windows jump around in time and, taken together, don’t tell a unified or straightforward story, though we do get to see the whole life of a character named William, born in 1957, dead in 2027. Instead, McGuire tells the story of the room itself (much like Ware tells the story of a single building in Building Stories). More importantly, “Here” has a story to tell about the relationship between time and space. In McGuire’s experiment, space and http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 4/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought time together form a unified four-dimensional block, and “Here” gives us interesting cross sections of that block. We may experience time as a mundane sequence of moments, McGuire seems to argue, but we should not forget that other times are equally real, existing where (if not when) we stand. What has made this six-page comic so appealing to form-conscious cartoonists is, I think, the brilliantly simple device that McGuire devised to communicate his core idea. Panels within panels: before you see what McGuire does with it, you wouldn’t have expected such a simple—even obvious—device in the cartoonist’s toolkit to be so powerful. Panels are, if you think about it, a pretty strange weapon in the cartoonist’s representational arsenal. They depend on creating two types of representational confusion. First, the individual panel creates an illusion of opening onto a scene without obtruding into it. It invites comparison to the cinematic frame, and one often finds critics using the visual vocabulary of film staging to describe particular moments in comics. Like the photographic image, the individual panel can seem to render frozen instants of time. But, as Will Eisner notes in Comics and Sequential Art, the panel is much more than a technical device. It is “part of the creative process, rather than result of technology” (38). The panel is just as much an icon—and requires just as much thought—as the cartoon figures within the panel, and the best cartoonists know this, manipulating panel shape, size, and border weight to create different moods and aesthetic effects. Moreover, as Scott McCloud shows in Understanding Comics, time works in a funny way within panels (96). Any seemingly still moment within a panel is actually internally divided, consisting of a temporal sequence. But in order to read comics, we often suspend our awareness of this sequence. Figure 3: Scott McCloud on Intra-Panel Time http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 5/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought The sequential arrangement of panels invites a second helpful confusion: the confusion of reading comics with reading text. It is easy to participate in this confusion because panels are usually organized roughly into reading order, from left to right, top to bottom. We are invited to imagine that the order of reading corresponds to the progression of a film strip, that every new panel, with the exception of flashbacks and other overt breaks in linear storytelling, moves us inexorably forward in narrative time. And most of the time, this is the case. Avant-garde comics, however, such as those collected in Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics anthology, tend to challenge the assimilation of panel order to reading order. http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 6/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought Figure 4: From Ibn al Rabin, Cidre et Schnapps, reprinted in Molotiu’s Abstract Comics Panels continue, in many of the comics that Molotiu collects, to create a rhythm of reading (and without this visual rhythm it would be hard to differentiate these abstract comics from painting). But Molotiu’s anthology also draws our attention to the fact that the comics page can achieve design effects that transcend those created by reading panels in a strictly linear sequence. This is the property of the comics page that Groensteen calls “iconic solidarity,” which he defines as the capacity of comics to create “interdependent images that, http://theaccountmagazine.com/?article=a-theory-of-here 7/21 9/16/2016 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated . and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia” (18). Panels in sequence, panels that seem to portray time’s movement, can actually become meaningful in terms of their spatial relations. It’s as if all of the panels on the page were occurring at the same time or momentarily transcending time.