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McGuire, Richard

Entry updated 7 August 2023. Tagged: Artist, Author, Comics.

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(1957-    ) US comics artist and author whose Graphic Novel Here (graph 2014), which began as a short story in graphic form, "Here" (January 1989 RAW), is of considerable sf interest. The basic structure of the enterprise is non-chronological. Each double-page panel gives a perspectivally invariant view of a single location in north-eastern America, probably semi-rural New Jersey, so that the "tale" is locked in space. Time, however, is fluid: each panel is precisely dated, but the 130 or so individual scenes so designated are not presented in any apparent narrative or thematic order. The range scenes is in fact enormous, the first sustained set of "shots" dating to three million BCE, long before the presence of Homo sapiens on the planet, and extending into the distant Near Future, when our "normal" lives have become a memory (see Ruins and Futurity). Most of the pages, however, depict scenes from 1907 until a century later, with the centre of the double-fold representing, with an effect close to trompe d'oeil, the corner of a single room, which is decorated and redecorated as a varying cast, seemingly related, engage in the pleasures and miseries of domestic life, though again these lives are not presented in chronological order. Space in Here is at the beck of Time: a presentation of the world intimately conversant with some of the deepest structural impulsions of Fantastika as a whole. Time itself here is seen as the story. [JC]

Richard McGuire

born New Jersey: 1957

works (highly selected)

  • Here (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014) [graphic novel: small portion first appeared January 1989 RAW: illus/hb/Richard McGuire]

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