The 24 November 2014 cover of The New Yorker, called ‘Time Warp,’ saw a man at a Zebra crossing in (presumably) New York. The man was joined by his ancestors from 1620, 1915, 1957 and 1968, as well as his descendants from 2492 and 2525. The temporal interventions were achieved through what could unironically be called “time-frames.” The limbs superimposed expertly and the frames were imbued with impeccably observed period details: flower-power pants for the 1968 hippie; wrist-watch and suitcase, a Mad Men ensemble for the 1957 professional; and suitably futuristic looking overalls and a smart phone for 2525. The cover was commissioned by Françoise Mouly, one of the most influential arts editors of the past three decades. Mouly produced more than a thousand covers since 1993, when Tina Brown, editor of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, appointed her as the weekly’s arts editor. The Obama fist-bump caricature, the Mother’s Day cover featuring a two-mother family, the black-on-black twin towers tribute were all produced under Mouly’s watch, and The New Yorker’s covers became as much about the power of ideas as their raw visual appeal.
The artist who created this cover was Richard McGuire, a toy designer and illustrator among many other hats, who built on this idea in his recent book Here. Across its 300-odd pages, Here remains fixed in space but not in time, following the same American suburban living room over billions of years. There are accidents and conspiracies, births and deaths, disputes and reconciliations, all meshed together in the cosmic dance of McGuire’s imagination. It is a unique work which, one suspects, will be remembered as a watershed moment in the history of graphic storytelling.
The first few pages of Here depict the room circa 1942, 1957, 2007 and 2014, respectively. We then see the first human character in the book, a woman, who asks herself, in 1957, “Hmm… now why did I come in here again?” She’s accompanied by a black cat walking coolly across the room in 1999. In the very next two-page spread, we see the woman framed, marooned in the middle of a scene from 1623. The house hasn’t been built yet and the area is part of a bleak, leafless forest. The cat, meanwhile, is licking its paw in 1999. In the next spread, we see it walking away from the action.
These opening pages introduce the reader to two important tenets of McGuire’s vision; ephemerality and resonance. He places the woman in the middle of an uninhabited forest in 1623, and in doing this, is not only tugging at our perception of time, but also gently pointing out that the woman’s presence, as indeed our own, is a fleeting event. The three consecutive appearances of the cat is, of course, a sly nod to a popular Western myth: two black cats crossing your path is a sign that déjà vu is around the corner (depicted most famously in in a scene in The Matrix). The third appearance, then, is McGuire’s way of telling us that given the right lens, the entire human experience can be viewed as déjà vu all along. Much later on in the book, Benjamin Franklin, one of the United State’s founding fathers, in a cameo, remarks to his grandson, “Life has a flair for rhyming events.”
These are big, hefty questions to begin a book with. But fifty pages into Here, you realise that McGuire’s ambitions are at par with those of novelists Marcel Proust or Thomas Pynchon. Attempting to explain its seemingly endless stream of bravura sequences is futile, not to mention a bit of a killjoy. I will hence restrict myself to one ridiculously well-executed scene that shows a group of four senior citizens in the room. Three of them are on a couch while the fourth, a bespectacled old gent, is sitting on a chair towards their left. One of them tells the following joke, spread across five two-page spreads. The joke itself is an old one (each line is revealed in one double-page spread): “Ok, so a guy calls his doctor for some test results. The doctor says, ‘Well Mr. Jones, I have some good news and some bad news… The good news is you have twenty-four hours to live.’‘That’s the good news?! What’s the bad news?!’ The doctor says, ‘I should have told you yesterday’”
McGuire frames this unfolding scene against a series of backdrops that tell us what’s really going on here. When the joke begins, the backdrop is 1955. The succeeding spreads visit the years 8000 and 1009 BC, respectively, even as the joke is progressing. The humans of 1989 are a digital sketch, drawn in a mechanical, pop art style: the lines are clear-cut and the colour contrast is high. The backdrops, however, are hand-painted in a lush, lovingly detailed manner, the softness of green watercolours making for a gorgeous natural backdrop in 1009 B.C. The message is loud and clear: as a species, we have moved on from raw aestheticism to cool irony.
But McGuire isn’t quite done yet. The line “The good news is you have twenty-four hours to live” is accompanied by a small frame from the year 1763, showing a tree on the verge of being felled by a woodcutter. By the time the punchline of the joke arrives, the axe has done its deed. There is, however, no such thing as an inconsequential action in Here. Within the next three spreads, we see that the bespectacled old man laughs so hard at the joke that he begins to cough, finally keeling over backwards on his chair, dead. The coughing is framed against a backdrop of a burning house from 1783, just twenty years after the forest was cleared.
In Scott McCloud’s classic 1993 book Understanding Comics, he explains this process thusly: “In learning to read comics, we all learned to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same. The problem is there’s no conversion chart! The few centimetres which transport us from second to second in one sequence could take us a hundred million years in another. So, as readers, we’re left with a vague sense that our eyes are moving through space, they’re also moving through time… we just don’t know by how much!”
In fact, McCloud explains this variable “speed” using a sequence of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of the zoopraxiscope, a late-nineteenth-century photography device developed before the invention of the modern-day film strip.
According to McCloud, this sequence is a perfect example of how comics guide the eye and how the space between consecutive panels—called “the gutter”—holds the key to its storytelling magic: the mind “completes” the action, attaining a closure of sorts. Here has a strikingly similar sequence towards the half-way mark, wherein a bird flies into the room in 1998, scaring the living daylights out of a girl reading quietly—the bird chirps “TWEEEEEETWEEEEEET” even as the girl says, “I’m trying to read!” an anachronistic reference to Twitter, but that’s a different story. Much as the running man was captured by Muybridge at different stages of his sprint, McGuire draws the girl running away from the intrusive bird, step-by-step; in all, the bird has been drawn eight times and the girl six times, along with a total of nine frames. All of the frames are, of course, marked “1998.” The deliberate usage of the frames and the dynamic layout of the spread indicate McGuire’s keen awareness of the gutter’s power.
There is another standout graphic novel that references Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope; Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). Ware has since acknowledged McGuire’s influence on his oeuvre in a Guardian review of Here. But even if you take into consideration the fact that Here took fifteen years to make, Jimmy Corrigan still pre-dates it, having been serialised in Ware’s series Acme Novelty Library in the 1990s. Who and what connects these two time-bending comics heavyweights?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is Françoise Mouly. In 1980, when Mouly was still 13 years away from joining The New Yorker, she along with her husband Art Spiegelman (the creator of Maus, perhaps the single most acclaimed graphic novel of all time) started editing and publishing RAW, an anthology of alternative comics. With time, RAW came to be recognised as an influential publication, with its mixture of American, European and Japanese talent and its excellent production values. In fact, Mouly’s emphasis on RAW’s production values can be seen in the immaculate way Here has been packaged and put together: the cover image is that of a single window, which can just as easily be seen as a comics panel. The upper pane is opaque while the lower pane is half-hidden by a curtain. Light and darkness, sunshine and shadow, revelation and obfuscation: what is this if not a meta-statement on the art of comics in general and the mechanism of this book in particular?
In 1989, then, the first issue of the second volume of RAW was released. It included, among other things, a six-page comic strip written and drawn by McGuire, also called Here. This black-and-white strip contains the nucleus of the book that was to be twenty-five years down the line. The black cat gag, the meditations on family and inheritance, the ecological overtones: they’re all here.
A brief examination of RAW Vol. 2, Issue 1 also tells us a lot about the future of alternative comics and their role in comics being taken a lot more seriously from the late 1980s onwards. The first story itself, Teen Plague, was by Charles Burns, who would re-work some of its themes and concerns in Black Hole, his classic 2005 graphic novel. There was Joost Swarte, who coined the term ligne claire (French for “clear line”) to describe the style made famous by Tintin. There was Kim Deitch and Ben Katchor and finally, there was Speigelman himself, quietly presenting yet another chapter of Maus. Mouly and Spiegelman thus introduced several future comics superstars, including Ware and Alan Moore, of Watchmen and V for Vendetta fame. Later, Mouly would also get Ware to make several famous New Yorker covers, including the aforementioned Mother’s Day special; this is another common thread in McGuire’ and Ware’s careers.
Amidst such luminaries, then, McGuire more than held his own. Time has rewarded him at last, and we are all much richer for it.