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Here
304 pages
A dizzying, beautiful meditation on deep time that collapses millions of years into a single, ordinary living room.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping outside the flow of time and viewing human existence from a god-like, yet deeply empathetic, vantage point. The experience is entirely non-linear and wonderfully meandering; you don't so much read it as you wander through its overlapping windows of history, lingering on the visual rhymes between a prehistoric landscape, a 1950s family argument, and a distant, flooded future. It evokes a profound sense of sonder and existential awe, making you feel infinitesimally small while simultaneously highlighting the precious, fleeting beauty of ordinary moments. With its sparse, fragmented dialogue and masterful visual layering, it is a quiet, melancholic masterpiece that will delight anyone drawn to formal experimentation and philosophical meditations on impermanence.
- Mood
- nostalgic
- awe-inspiring
- melancholic
- tranquil
- Tone
- contemplative
- observational
- tender
- philosophical
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the passage of time · impermanence · deep time · memory and space · interconnectedness of eras
- The writing
- Sparse, fragmented snippets of everyday dialogue float across meticulously layered, non-linear visual tableaus.
- The arc
- Begins with quiet curiosity about a mundane space and expands into a dizzying, poignant awe at the vastness of time.
- Who it's for
- Lovers of formal experimentation and visual poetry who want to be gently overwhelmed by the scale of the universe.
Content notes
- existential themes
- aging and death
About the book
"Richard McGuire's Here is the story of a corner of a room and the events that happened in that space while moving forward and backward in time. The book experiments with formal properties of comics, using multiple panels to convey the different moments in time. Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic toy that resembles the same dinosaur in the year 1999. Conversations appear to be happening between two people who are centuries apart. Someone asking, "Anyone seen my car keys?" can be "answered" by someone at a future archeology dig. Cycles of glaciers transform into marshes, then into forests, then into farmland. A city develops and grows into a suburban sprawl. Future climate changes cause the land to submerge, if only temporarily, for the long view reveals the transient nature of all things. Meanwhile, the attention is focused on the most ordinary moments and appreciating them as the most transcendent"--
Description from Open Library.
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