A mere six pages. That's all it took Richard McGuire in 1989 to dig up the "future transitional fossil" that would push the narrative possibilities of the comics medium. A good 25 years after that publication in RAW magazine, he turned the original story into the jaw-dropping graphic novel Here.
Richard McGuire: right here, right now
The year is 1989: after a short silence, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly kick off Volume 2 of their legendary RAW magazine with an issue called "Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix". In addition to a new instalment of Spiegelman's Maus, Charles Burns's "Teen Plague from Outer Space", and stories by Ben Katchor and Jacques de Loustal, it contains six pages by one Richard McGuire, who as a member of the post-punk band Liquid Liquid created the addictive bass line which very quickly found its way to the general public via Melle Mel's "White Lines", but who was still new to the comics medium. Inexperienced as he was, in "Here" he managed to make past, present, and future converge in such a deceptively simple, brand-new way that he at once opened a new world of narrative possibilities in the comics medium. In short: Richard McGuire broke the boundaries of time, by layering differently dated panels into drawings of always the same spot ("here") throughout time, thereby linking his characters' dreams, daily struggles, and losses to those of the people who came before and after them, and to their former and future selves.
It was following a lecture by Art Spiegelman that Richard McGuire came to think of the structural patterns underlying comics. "I remember that I had just moved into a new apartment at that time and I was thinking about the person who lived there before me. Somehow that put me on the trail of a way of showing different times. My first idea was to use the corner of a room as a dividing line, so I could split the space in half, and have half the room moving forward in time and the other half going backward. As I was making my sketches, a friend came to visit me and he was telling me about his new Windows software, that allowed you to open different windows simultaneously. And that's when it hit me."
"Here" is a formal exercise that cannot merely be reduced to a brain wave, an attempt to play with time and visualise that game. As Chris Ware – whose working years were still to come when "Here" was published, but who as a comics fanatic immediately sent McGuire a fan letter – put it in an issue of Comic Art from 2006: it was a "simple, maddeningly obvious and magically electrical metaphor for the longing that is life passing into oblivion." "Here" employs a different visual language simply because there is a need for it, because time in itself is the main character, shaped by the passage of all those unsightly stories of all those passers-by, and because there is an underlying vision of how these seemingly insignificant moments define us more than anything. This became even more obvious a good 25 years later, when Richard McGuire turned the original six-page story into a 300-page graphic novel.
"Here" is a formal exercise that cannot merely be reduced to a brain wave, an attempt to play with time and visualise that game. As Chris Ware – whose working years were still to come when "Here" was published, but who as a comics fanatic immediately sent McGuire a fan letter – put it in an issue of Comic Art from 2006: it was a "simple, maddeningly obvious and magically electrical metaphor for the longing that is life passing into oblivion." "Here" employs a different visual language simply because there is a need for it, because time in itself is the main character, shaped by the passage of all those unsightly stories of all those passers-by, and because there is an underlying vision of how these seemingly insignificant moments define us more than anything. This became even more obvious a good 25 years later, when Richard McGuire turned the original six-page story into a 300-page graphic novel.
Was "Here" always meant to be a try-out for a book?
Richard McGuire: No! At the time, it was all I could do. [Laughs out loud] It was one of the first comics I ever did. I didn't consider myself a cartoonist, and even now, I still don't. Making those six pages was exhausting; it must have taken me about half a year. Because I had never done anything quite like it. I was learning as I went along. Once it came out, I had already switched gears. I didn't want to do another comic. I did some children's books for a while, and then, after a few years, I became bored with that, and I thought about expanding the original story. By the time I got around to seriously getting back to the book, I think Maus was already a big success, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was just about to be released. I signed a contract in 2000, and…well…it only took me 14 years. [Laughs]
How come?
McGuire: I was scared to go back to it, because over the years, the first six-page story was given more and more attention. I didn't want to screw it up. I started to doubt myself: "What do you have to say?" "How can you expand it?" It was only when a few things came together, that I felt I could do it. A big, important step was when I had the idea of putting the corner of the room into the fold of the book. Suddenly it became an object. I come from an art background, and I made a lot of sculptures – I still do actually – and the idea of the book as an object got me excited. Then I decided I really had to go deeper. The place where the original story was set, was not a real place. Those six pages were more of a formal exercise, really. They were more about the structure, and once the structure was there, decorating it. This other version had to be something much deeper. Not just in the sense that I had to do research, but I would really have to invest in it. At that point I decided it was going to be the home that I grew up in. So many things had happened since 1989, even between 2000 and 2011, when I went back to work on it. My parents had passed away, we had to empty the house to sell it. So while I was working on the book, all of that stuff was going on, and it was, you know, going through family photos, a real…emotional process. It took on a whole life of its own at some point.
HEAR, HEAR, THE HYBRID
It is a life that simultaneously adheres to its creator's skin and also chooses the briny deep of the condition humaine. In between the first pages, in which a woman wonders "Now why did I come in here again?" and the last, where the same woman picks up a book with the words "Now I remember" – both dated 1957, McGuire's year of birth –, a story develops and escapes, is up for grabs and remains ever-ephemeral, taking the reader backwards (as far as 3,000,500,000 BCE) and forwards (as far as the year 22,175 CE) through time. With visual motives and moods as an associative thread, offering a counterweight to the lack of clear characters or a delineated plot.
Richard McGuire: No! At the time, it was all I could do. [Laughs out loud] It was one of the first comics I ever did. I didn't consider myself a cartoonist, and even now, I still don't. Making those six pages was exhausting; it must have taken me about half a year. Because I had never done anything quite like it. I was learning as I went along. Once it came out, I had already switched gears. I didn't want to do another comic. I did some children's books for a while, and then, after a few years, I became bored with that, and I thought about expanding the original story. By the time I got around to seriously getting back to the book, I think Maus was already a big success, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was just about to be released. I signed a contract in 2000, and…well…it only took me 14 years. [Laughs]
How come?
McGuire: I was scared to go back to it, because over the years, the first six-page story was given more and more attention. I didn't want to screw it up. I started to doubt myself: "What do you have to say?" "How can you expand it?" It was only when a few things came together, that I felt I could do it. A big, important step was when I had the idea of putting the corner of the room into the fold of the book. Suddenly it became an object. I come from an art background, and I made a lot of sculptures – I still do actually – and the idea of the book as an object got me excited. Then I decided I really had to go deeper. The place where the original story was set, was not a real place. Those six pages were more of a formal exercise, really. They were more about the structure, and once the structure was there, decorating it. This other version had to be something much deeper. Not just in the sense that I had to do research, but I would really have to invest in it. At that point I decided it was going to be the home that I grew up in. So many things had happened since 1989, even between 2000 and 2011, when I went back to work on it. My parents had passed away, we had to empty the house to sell it. So while I was working on the book, all of that stuff was going on, and it was, you know, going through family photos, a real…emotional process. It took on a whole life of its own at some point.
HEAR, HEAR, THE HYBRID
It is a life that simultaneously adheres to its creator's skin and also chooses the briny deep of the condition humaine. In between the first pages, in which a woman wonders "Now why did I come in here again?" and the last, where the same woman picks up a book with the words "Now I remember" – both dated 1957, McGuire's year of birth –, a story develops and escapes, is up for grabs and remains ever-ephemeral, taking the reader backwards (as far as 3,000,500,000 BCE) and forwards (as far as the year 22,175 CE) through time. With visual motives and moods as an associative thread, offering a counterweight to the lack of clear characters or a delineated plot.
Richard McGuire: "In my studio I created a timeline, one long band of paper all around the room, and I would add dates and bits of information I had researched and which I wanted to be part of the story. In the end I had to cut up so much in the process, because I really had a different idea going in. I thought for it to be a 300-page book, you would have to have characters you really believe in, and then you follow their lives. But a lot of the dialogue that I had written was slowing the story down. It didn't feel like the original anymore. It lacked movement. It's only when I stopped thinking of it like a normal graphic novel, and instead started seeing the poetry and the musicality in it, a rhythm and patterns, that I managed to find my way. Letting the dialogue become lyrics, made much more sense."
"After that realisation, the whole process was just a constant collage, cutting up and rearranging, right to the end. I had to go the long way to realise that. But again, I don't consider myself to be a comic book artist. I don't even have a way of drawing, I don't have a style that I stick with. I knew that I had to be kind of faithful to the first version, but I couldn't simply mimic what I had done 25 years earlier. So I was trying out all these different things, and as I was experimenting, I thought it all worked nicely together, mixing the computer work with the more manual work. But I only discovered that as I went."
Then again, the recognition Here has gotten over the years, must have been overwhelming. Do you think it is in some ways easier to enter the comics medium as an outsider?
McGuire: I feel like I'm an outsider with every single thing I do, really. I never feel any one thing. With my music too, I'm a total naive musician. I try my best at everything I do, but I often put myself in a position where I don't know what I'm doing. It's always exciting to just jump into things.
Are you driven by wonder?
McGuire: It is certainly a sense of play, yes. At the same time, these things have to happen. Usually, at my studio, I'll have a bunch of different things going on. Sometimes one thing will suggest where to go with something else. It's all very natural, looking at things from the corner of my eye. Never force it, just let it happen. The accidents that happen like that are very exciting, and it's the only way I can work. Many times, I will be working on something and not know where I am going. Collecting stuff, putting things in files, and then, all of a sudden, I can see where I am heading with it.
Here is not a traditional graphic novel either. It's like a hybrid of an artist's book and a comic book. It's not either one. I think that I am more excited about things that are hybrids, that are pushing the possibilities. Hybrids are the only way anything ever evolves.
"After that realisation, the whole process was just a constant collage, cutting up and rearranging, right to the end. I had to go the long way to realise that. But again, I don't consider myself to be a comic book artist. I don't even have a way of drawing, I don't have a style that I stick with. I knew that I had to be kind of faithful to the first version, but I couldn't simply mimic what I had done 25 years earlier. So I was trying out all these different things, and as I was experimenting, I thought it all worked nicely together, mixing the computer work with the more manual work. But I only discovered that as I went."
Then again, the recognition Here has gotten over the years, must have been overwhelming. Do you think it is in some ways easier to enter the comics medium as an outsider?
McGuire: I feel like I'm an outsider with every single thing I do, really. I never feel any one thing. With my music too, I'm a total naive musician. I try my best at everything I do, but I often put myself in a position where I don't know what I'm doing. It's always exciting to just jump into things.
Are you driven by wonder?
McGuire: It is certainly a sense of play, yes. At the same time, these things have to happen. Usually, at my studio, I'll have a bunch of different things going on. Sometimes one thing will suggest where to go with something else. It's all very natural, looking at things from the corner of my eye. Never force it, just let it happen. The accidents that happen like that are very exciting, and it's the only way I can work. Many times, I will be working on something and not know where I am going. Collecting stuff, putting things in files, and then, all of a sudden, I can see where I am heading with it.
Here is not a traditional graphic novel either. It's like a hybrid of an artist's book and a comic book. It's not either one. I think that I am more excited about things that are hybrids, that are pushing the possibilities. Hybrids are the only way anything ever evolves.
Here could have kept on evolving for eternity. Where do you stop?
McGuire: Oh, I know! It can go on endlessly and in theory this book could be infinite. You know, at some point somebody said to me: "Oh, you didn't put the Civil War in." [Howls with laughter] Well, it's not about the big historical moments, it's about these tiny little things in life that don't get documented. These little, natural moments that feel casual, a slight touch, some little thing that can have significance. It's all we have when everything is just constantly disappearing.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Here is a celebration of the poetry of life. Of the things that keep us warm at night, that get us through the day, that make us jump with joy, feel angry, or confused…the small routines that so subtly mark our days we almost forget about them.
There is comfort and perspective in knowing you're not alone, in discovering that underneath the wallpaper you're tearing off, is another, unexpected layer. Richard McGuire: "I think the reaction to Here has been so strong, because it touches on shared experiences, those kind of milestones of our own lives, like weddings, and funerals, and birthdays. When I was doing research for the book, I was fortunate enough to meet a collector of vernacular photography, and he let me go through his archives. Within those thousands and thousands of photographs, you could see we all make the same pictures: kids' birthdays, holidays… I started seeing them as a sort of collective memory and mixed a lot of his photos in with my own family photos. Because there is a lot of my own family in there. In fact, the real seed of the whole project – part of which I integrated into the book as well – was my father taking a photograph of me and my brothers and sisters every year around Christmas. Always in the same location, always in the same position."
"To me, Here is a kind of salute to my parents. It's not their story, they are just walking through it like everybody else. My parents had that house for 50 years, which is nothing compared to the native Americans living there for 10,000 years, and even less when you think of the bigger scope of the billions of years of the universe… But even though I have lived in a million places, that house will always be the icon of home to me."
MEET THE AUTHOR: RICHARD MCGUIRE
17/6, 20.00, Passa Porta, www.passaporta.be
McGuire: Oh, I know! It can go on endlessly and in theory this book could be infinite. You know, at some point somebody said to me: "Oh, you didn't put the Civil War in." [Howls with laughter] Well, it's not about the big historical moments, it's about these tiny little things in life that don't get documented. These little, natural moments that feel casual, a slight touch, some little thing that can have significance. It's all we have when everything is just constantly disappearing.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Here is a celebration of the poetry of life. Of the things that keep us warm at night, that get us through the day, that make us jump with joy, feel angry, or confused…the small routines that so subtly mark our days we almost forget about them.
There is comfort and perspective in knowing you're not alone, in discovering that underneath the wallpaper you're tearing off, is another, unexpected layer. Richard McGuire: "I think the reaction to Here has been so strong, because it touches on shared experiences, those kind of milestones of our own lives, like weddings, and funerals, and birthdays. When I was doing research for the book, I was fortunate enough to meet a collector of vernacular photography, and he let me go through his archives. Within those thousands and thousands of photographs, you could see we all make the same pictures: kids' birthdays, holidays… I started seeing them as a sort of collective memory and mixed a lot of his photos in with my own family photos. Because there is a lot of my own family in there. In fact, the real seed of the whole project – part of which I integrated into the book as well – was my father taking a photograph of me and my brothers and sisters every year around Christmas. Always in the same location, always in the same position."
"To me, Here is a kind of salute to my parents. It's not their story, they are just walking through it like everybody else. My parents had that house for 50 years, which is nothing compared to the native Americans living there for 10,000 years, and even less when you think of the bigger scope of the billions of years of the universe… But even though I have lived in a million places, that house will always be the icon of home to me."
MEET THE AUTHOR: RICHARD MCGUIRE
17/6, 20.00, Passa Porta, www.passaporta.be
Read more about: Podium
Fijn dat je wil reageren. Wie reageert, gaat akkoord met onze huisregels. Hoe reageren via Disqus? Een woordje uitleg.