Here by Richard McGuire review – an exquisitely drawn ecological warning

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.

View image in fullscreen

It’s not difficult to see what the fuss is about. Here is an exquisitely drawn book, its restrained palette and pop style calling to mind the work of such diverse artists as Vermeer, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Richard Hamilton. To hold it is to covet it. McGuire has again miraculously concertinaed thousands of years of American life – the narrative flips back to 500BC, and forwards to 2033 – into a few dozen pages, and without ever leaving the confines of a suburban sitting room (the book’s gutter cleverly forms one of its four corners). But this time, his conceit feels so much more vital, so weighty. For all its outward beauty, the heart of Here is, by my reading, unavoidably moral, for it comes with an implicit warning about our stewardship of the planet.

At one point, a dinosaur wanders across the pages; at another, the author ponders a future apocalypse. In between, there are walk-on parts for generations of McGuire relatives (we’re in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he grew up); for Benjamin Franklin, who on the eve of the American revolution travelled to a house nearby to argue with his estranged son; and for the Lenape, the Native Americans who inhabited Delaware before the arrival of the European settlers. McGuire treats time as a hopscotch-playing child treats a pavement: he parcels it into squares, and then jumps all over it. It’s a dizzying technique, and sometimes his narrative moved so fast, I began to feel (I mean this literally) queasy. Its message, though, was never anything less than clear. Yes, we may be just a speck on the face of our planet. But even dots have responsibilities; even mere particles must be accountable to those who will follow.

Here is published by Hamish Hamilton (£25). Click here to buy it for £20