Graphic Novel, Here, by Richard McGuire

Here
Richard McGuire
ISBN: 978037540650
Graphic novelization of a light-on-narrative comic strip based in a specific place; a corner of a room.
Read July 28, 2015
(Fair warning, I'm reviewing my summer reads WAY out of order.  I have a stack nearly a yard high, and I WILL get to them all, but it's going to be in fits and spurts, and not anywhere near the order I read them in.)

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this one.

First, a description of what you're in for.  So, you know, SPOILERS.





The reader is essentially a voyeur in a specific place, throughout time.  We get flashes of this place from millions of years in the past, up through history and the present time, to dozens, then hundreds, then even tens of thousands of years into the future.  The majority of the "story" takes place between roughly 1600 and 2500, with a rotating cast of Native Americans, American colonists (perhaps Ben Franklin?), pioneers and homesteaders (where our viewpoint location is still outside) through to the early 1900s when the house is constructed around us, into the twentieth century where we see a generation of a family age and move on, and new residents sequentially come into the house, and finally the house itself eventually succumbing to global warming-induced drowning, and the land reverting back to a future paradise-warm wilderness.

The kick is that none of this is actually happening in chronological order.  That's not entirely true - there are sequences of perhaps six or a dozen pages where events in a particular time are sequential from spread to spread for the purposes of establishing a smidgen of narrative flow.  The weird part for me is that most of those sequential passages are inside windows "out of time" and the background view of the location is a totally neutral time period, and there are quite often many other "windows" into different times that may or may not be sequential (but usually are at least thematically related).  Often a story will pop into being at a narratively-interesting juncture, but not actually finish out a scene to a complete logical end-point.    

The colors are muted - 4tone printing, and using a lot of dull washes makes it seem like a colorized sepia print most times.  I was hoping to use the color as a code for what time period was what, or at least what storyline was what, but either my attention was defective or the association wasn't actually there, because that didn't work out at all.

It was an interesting read, and reminded me quite a lot of Last Days of an Immortal in the sense of not ever feeling entirely sure I knew what exactly was going on, but still involved and interested in the story.