Graphic Novel Review – Here by Richard McGuire (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fiction/Graphic Novel
Length: 304 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: December 9, 2014
ISBN-13: : 978-0375406508
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Gift
Rating: 4/5 stars
“From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision. Richard McGuire’s Here is the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this book as a gift for my birthday.
Thoughts: This is basically the story of a certain place. For much of the book it is a particular room in a house (the family room) but the graphic novel also ventures into times before the house was built and after the house was destroyed. Each page shows you the year and as the book goes on sometimes there are small panels from many different years inserted throughout. The drawing itself is very well done in beautiful muted colors and I enjoyed it.
If I was a more careful reader I would probably try and follow all of the different timelines more closely. The book jumps willy nilly between timeframes and as I said, sometimes many timelines are overlapping. Sometimes I think things are shown overlapped to show how similar people’s actions are across many decades. I also appreciated the statement the book made about how short the timeframe of humanity’s existence has been and how big of an impact humanity has had on its environment.
This was a very quick but very creative read and I enjoyed it. I did think that the book got a bit too chaotic for me at points and I struggled to keep all the different stories from different timeframes straight as we jumped in and out of them. I guess I would have liked this to be a bit more linear, but I do appreciate the art and storytelling that went into super-imposing all these images within each other.
My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed this and would recommend it. It was a graphic novel I can see myself re-reading a few times because I think I will pick up on new things each time I read it. I loved the idea behind it and enjoyed the art style. However, I did find it a bit confusing to keep track of all the timelines. The fact that panels from one time are inserted into panels from another time can be a bit hard to follow. If you are intrigued by graphic novels that push the art style of graphic novels and tell a story in a new creative way I would definitely recommend this.
