Here by Richard McGuire review – an exquisitely drawn ecological warning

Dizzying technique and moral purpose mark out graphic novelist Richard McGuire’s return to the themes he first explored 25 years ago

Here by Richard McGuire: ‘calling to mind the work of such diverse artists as Vermeer, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Richard Hamilton’.

Rachel Cooke

Sunday 21 December 2014  The Observer

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.
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