A Theory of Here PDF

2/23/2019 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought
A Theory of “Here”
C RITI C IS M / L E E KON STAN TIN OU
:: A Theory of Here ::
About halfway through Here, the experimental cartoonist Richard

McGuire opens a window—well, a panel—onto the year 10,175. This far-
future scene is layered atop a larger image that takes place in 1775, some-
where on the east coast of what will become the United States, showing a
cryptic conversation about the pending Revolutionary War. By now, we’ve
learned how to read Here. McGuire’s book—it would be a mistake to call
it, as many have done, a graph ic nov el—scrambles the normal logic of
comics narrative. Instead of creating juxtaposed sequences of panels that
together tell a unified story, Here’s pages show the same location in space
at different times. The book features a sequence of lushly colored double-
page spreads, each one set in a different year (indicated with a tag in the
upper-left corner of the page). Smaller panels often hover over the main
double-page frame, depicting the same location either before or after the
dominant year. Mostly, we observe the corner of a nondescript room, see-
ing how it stays the same or changes across the years, observing its vari-
ous human inhabitants at different ages and in different states of health.
These panels have, by the midpoint of the book, largely focused on the
past and the present; McGuire has rendered times before the house was
constructed, has dramatized encounters between the indigenous popula-
tion and newly arrived settler-colonists, and has even let us see the year
1,009 BCE. We have also already peeked into the house’s future, observing
humans who inhabit the year 2016 (residents of this distant future seem
very much like us), as well as people using holographic interfaces in the
year 2050. So the attentive reader has probably already anticipated that
McGuire will show us the ultimate fate of the house—perhaps letting us
see far beyond. And he does. But what we see of the year 10,175 is far
stranger than we might have expected.
http://theaccountmagazine.com/article/a-theory-of-here 1/23
Figure 1: McGuire’s far-future marsupial
This unassuming panel, about the size of a playing card, opens onto an
animal, a marsupial of some sort, maybe the lovechild of a large possum
and a small kangaroo, standing on an empty field. It’s not any animal that
exists today, and not an animal we would expect to see in the American
northeast. The creature stares straight at us, as if it knows we’re watching,
suggesting that it might be more intelligent than your average marsupial.
The animal’s confident gaze is initially unsettling and comes to seem alien
precisely because the animal itself is so ordinary, so unthreatening. With
this innocuous panel, McGuire opens up a new continent of time, suggest-
ing that the second half of Here will more fully explore the ultimate fate of
the house. And again, Here does not disappoint, showing us the house’s
frightening destruction by (presumably global-warming-related) flooding,
taking us as far forward as the year 22,175, where new dinosaur-like crea-
tures roam the earth. And yet there is something uniquely affecting about
this particular marsupial, something about it that is even stranger than
the later dinosaur-creatures, something about its haunted eyes that gives
us access to the larger, unnerving significance of McGuire’s masterwork.
This little animal perfectly illustrates how McGuire uses comics to explore
the relationship between time and space.
McGuire first published “Here” in 1989 in Raw, an avant-garde comics

magazine created by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Only six pages
long, the original “Here” electrified the tiny world of experimental comics.
It was warmly received by long-established Underground cartoonists like
Justin Green and, most importantly, hugely influenced younger cartoon-
ists like Chris Ware. [i] The French comics critic Thierry Groensteen has
been extolling its praises for years, writing one of the first analyses of
“Here” in 1991. [ii]
Figure 2: A page from McGuire’s 1989 “Here”
The 1989 version of “Here” is superficially similar to the book. Each panel
features a dominant image of the corner of a room overlaid with smaller
panels displaying other images, images of the same room in the past and
the future. Like the book, the panel-windows jump around in time and,
taken together, don’t tell a unified or straightforward story, though we do
get to see the whole life of a character named William, born in 1957, dead
in 2027. Instead, McGuire tells the story of the room itself (much like
Ware tells the story of a single building in Build ing Sto ries). More impor-

tantly, “Here” has a story to tell about the relationship between time and
space. In McGuire’s experiment, space and time together form a unified
four-dimensional block, and “Here” gives us interesting cross sections of
that block. We may experience time as a mundane sequence of moments,
McGuire seems to argue, but we should not forget that other times are
equally real, existing where (if not when) we stand. What has made this
six-page comic so appealing to form-conscious cartoonists is, I think, the
brilliantly simple device that McGuire devised to communicate his core
idea. Panels within panels: before you see what McGuire does with it, you
wouldn’t have expected such a simple—even obvious—device in the
cartoonist’s toolkit to be so powerful.
Panels are, if you think about it, a pretty strange weapon in the
cartoonist’s representational arsenal. They depend on creating two types
of representational confusion. First, the individual panel creates an illu-
sion of opening onto a scene without obtruding into it. It invites compari-
son to the cinematic frame, and one often finds critics using the visual
vocabulary of film staging to describe particular moments in comics. Like
the photographic image, the individual panel can seem to render frozen
instants of time. But, as Will Eisner notes in Comics and Sequen tial Art,
the panel is much more than a technical device. It is “part of the creative
process, rather than result of technology” (38). The panel is just as much
an icon—and requires just as much thought—as the cartoon figures within
the panel, and the best cartoonists know this, manipulating panel shape,
size, and border weight to create different moods and aesthetic effects.
Moreover, as Scott McCloud shows in Under stand ing Comics, time works
in a funny way within panels (96). Any seemingly still moment within a
panel is actually internally divided, consisting of a temporal sequence. But
in order to read comics, we often suspend our awareness of this sequence.
Figure 3: Scott McCloud on Intra-Panel Time
The sequential arrangement of panels invites a second helpful confusion:

the confusion of reading comics with reading text. It is easy to participate
in this confusion because panels are usually organized roughly into read-
ing order, from left to right, top to bottom. We are invited to imagine that
the order of reading corresponds to the progression of a film strip, that
every new panel, with the exception of flashbacks and other overt breaks
in linear storytelling, moves us inexorably forward in narrative time. And
most of the time, this is the case. Avant-garde comics, however, such as
those collected in Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics anthology, tend to
challenge the assimilation of panel order to reading order.
Figure 4: From Ibn al Rabin, Cidre et Schnapps, reprinted in Molotiu’s Abstract Comics
Panels continue, in many of the comics that Molotiu collects, to create a

rhythm of reading (and without this visual rhythm it would be hard to dif-
ferentiate these abstract comics from painting). But Molotiu’s anthology
also draws our attention to the fact that the comics page can achieve
design effects that transcend those created by reading panels in a strictly

linear sequence. This is the property of the comics page that Groensteen
calls “iconic solidarity,” which he defines as the capacity of comics to cre-
ate “interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the
double characteristic of being separated … and which are plastically and
semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in prae sen
tia” (18). Panels in sequence, panels that seem to portray time’s move-
ment, can actually become meaningful in terms of their spatial relations.
It’s as if all of the panels on the page were occurring at the same time or
momentarily transcending time. So time and space have a funny relation-
ship on the comics page. Static moments seemingly captured by the panel
always necessarily contain their own past and future; and temporal
sequences across panels always necessarily form larger spatial units of
meaning that transcend the succession of time. But to read the over-
whelming majority of comics, we are required to forget these truths, or at
least temporarily to suspend our awareness of them. What McGuire’s
panels-within-panels do is make the unintuitive commingling of time and
space on the comics page—and the falseness that characterizes a surface-
level reading of comics narrative technique—exquisitely clear, turning this
commingling into an object of aesthetic pleasure. This is the genius of the
core device of “Here.” Twenty-five years on, McGuire’s book-length
update to his revolutionary six-page comic raises a variety of questions. If
the original had such a huge impact, what is left for the book to do? Does
Here move beyond “Here,” or simply bring the shorter comic’s brilliance
to a wider audience (which would itself be a worthy goal)? Does McGuire
deepen or reconsider the temporal philosophy of the original “Here”? And
if comics are a “way of thinking,” to paraphrase Chris Ware, what exactly
is Here thinking about? (Ball and Kuhlman xix)
Figure 5: A double-page spread from McGuire’s 2014 Here
One thing Here is thinking about is the relation of comics to digital tech-
nology. We might say that Here teaches us that comics is—or at a mini-
mum is becoming—a newly digital medium. Discussing contemporary
notions of textuality in Digi mod ernism, Alan Kirby brings together two
senses of the term “digital,” noting “the centrality of digital technology”
for contemporary artists as well as “the centrality of the digits, of the fin-
gers and thumbs that key and press and click in the business of material
textual elaboration” (51). This might seem like an unfortunate pun (and it
is), but it’s a pun that is nonetheless helpful to keep in mind when reading
the new version of Here. After all, comics is nothing if not a finger-
obsessed medium: it invites manipulation by our digits: flipping, folding,
pointing, fondling, stroking, even ripping.
The reader’s capacity to touch pictures, the physical weight of the book in
our hands—that is, the haptic dimension of comics—is part of what has
historically distinguished the medium from other representational art
forms and is one reason comics can so successfully combine the visual
urgency of film with the emotional intimacy of the novel. It is only slightly
an exaggeration to say that comics is an art of touching. And the best

comics have often sought to activate our awareness of their haptic materi-
ality. At the same time, comics is also becoming digital in the technologi-
cal sense. Like every other art form, it is being subsumed by digital tech-
nologies, but—again like every other art—it is becoming digital in its own
strange way. There’s even an iPad version of Here, which allows readers
to manipulate panels showing different times.
Figure 6: Richard McGuire’s recent New York er cover
But Here’s concern with digital computers is not just a matter of its
(seemingly inevitable) digitization. Rather, digitization is visible even in
the dead-tree version of Here, in the form of concepts drawn from the his-
tory of graphical user interface (GUI) design. At least since Vannevar Bush
first described the possibility of his imaginary Memex machine in the
pages of the Atlantic Month ly and Ivan Sutherland, inspired by Bush, cre-
ated the influential Sketchpad program in 1963, the history of digital com-
puters has been, in part, a history of the schemas, metaphors, and mediat-
ing concepts that have been designed to guide our relationship to techni-
cal systems and to mitigate the intimidating abstraction of the machine.
Figure 7: Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad
As the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson has pointed out, our domi-
nant operating systems have long relied on metaphors—mostly visual
metaphors—to make computers accessible (3). So it should come as no
surprise that concepts developed for the design of graphical user inter-
faces can migrate onto the pages of comics and (in the case of the iPad
version of Here) back again. And indeed, one of the original inspirations
for the 1989 version of “Here” was the windows-based GUI popularized by
Apple and then by Microsoft, which was in turn inspired by (or you could
say stolen from) Xerox PARC’s groundbreaking Xerox Alto, the first com-
puter to use a desktop metaphor to govern user interactions.
Figure 8: The Xerox Alto
(The Xerox Alto itself drew on concepts previously developed in Douglas

Engelbart’s oN-line System. Take a look at Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of
All Demos” if you want to see how genuinely non-innovative modern UI
design is). All of this design engineering was, of course, an important part
of the history of computation, but it was arguably even more important as

part of the history of what we might call applied epis te mol o gy. How, GUI
designers were forced to ask, can the abstract world of the machine, the
impersonal realm of the microprocessor, be made accessible (especially to
non-engineers)? But when we begin thinking of GUI design as applied
epistemology, it quickly becomes clear that visual metaphors do not elimi-
nate abstraction but rather substitute one kind of abstraction for another,
one representation scheme for another. A term like “accessibility” is a
deceptively simple word, whose seeming transparency obscures impor-
tant assumptions about the relationship among persons, machines, and
the world. As has often been noted, the metaphor of the desktop—or the
notion of storing data in discrete objects we call “files”—encodes all sorts
of norms guiding how humans and machines interact, suggesting that the
personal computer is first and foremost a work machine, a machine for
people imagined as workers.
The figure of the window, meanwhile, is a spatial translation of human-

machine interaction, compartmentalizing user attention, imagining the
user as engaged in a workflow of switching between windows (discrete
attention-states), bundling together tasks that software designers decide
belong together, and facilitating user multitasking. Though software
designers influence what we see, what tasks we are meant to associate
together, the windows metaphor invites us to imagine that we users have
a certain kind of agency, that we have the opportunity to manage our own
attention, that we can simply look out of this or that window, by choice,
whenever we want to. Windows evoke our existing sense of volition (we
feel we are choosing to look out this window rather than that window)
while also reifying the technical systems we’re encountering along partic-
ular lines (the contents of the window in question are naturalized, like the
landscape or cityscape we observe from the comfort of our home). So at
the same time that UI research addressed itself to the problem of giving
humans access to a seemingly impersonal, technically unwelcoming
realm, it also shaped that interaction toward particular use cases and has
invited us to accept what the machine serves up as given, natural, and
beyond our ability to change outside prescribed bounds. The machine
becomes both more accessible and—as anyone who has too many win-
dows or too many tabs open right now knows—quickly overwhelming.
One of McGuire’s original insights was that these technically implement-

ed figures—metaphors designed as the solution to problems of human-
machine interaction—were portable and fungible. “Here” appropriates the
windows metaphor for new, but related, ends. In McGuire’s hands, win-
dows organize another sort of inhuman vastness: the incomprehensible
vastness of time. Where windows-based GUIs unintentionally lead the
user from a feeling of mastery (one window open) into a feeling of drown-
ing (way too many windows open), McGuire’s little windows pile up indi-
vidually accessible, even semi-autonomous moments that in aggregate
snow the reader under the hideous size of time. In the original “Here,”
Deep Time comes in hand, becomes digital. Today, our technologies of
human-machine interaction have shifted and so too has McGuire’s
approach to the digital potential of comics. The most significant transfor-
mation of human-machine interaction since the creation of the modern
GUI is almost certainly the rise of ubiquitous mobile computing. Bush
described his Memex, after all, as “a desk … primarily the piece of furni-
ture at which [the user] works.”
Today, we carry our tiny, sleek desks inside our pockets. We wear them on
our wrists. And we may, soon enough, slap them onto our faces. This
mobile revolution builds, of course, on what already exists. Our little
pocket desks, running iOS and Android operating systems, still depend on
various desktop-like and windows-based metaphors. We often still work
with “files” that we occasionally toss away into the “trash” or a “recycling
bin.” What is different, though, is the increasingly salient possibility that
mobile devices might build a layer of information atop reality, that visual
figures designed to interact with machines might profoundly reshape how
we figure other dimensions of reality. As one character announces in
William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Coun try, cyberspace is “everting” or
colonizing the world (28). Whereas Gibson’s early novels focus on hacker
anti-heroes who enter the machine, navigating its sublime, unnerving
datascapes, his more recent books have been focused on how machines
have transformed his characters’ modes of embodiment within what we

used to naively regard as the reality outside the computer. In the near
term, this set of transformations may give rise to full-blown augmented
reality systems that use various visual metaphors to layer data dynamical-
ly atop the world. Whereas once upon a time we looked out from our com-
fy rooms through clearly designated “windows” onto something we could
well mistake for an outside world, today the room and the world have
almost seamlessly merged. The world itself has become our office, and we
are now, forever, chained to the desk. This, at any rate, seems to be the
new ideology of user-interface design.
This ideal—the confluence of ubiquitous mobile computing and augment-

ed reality—becomes the new digital horizon for Here. The book features
several sequences set in the twenty-third century, in which a hologram or
android leads a group of tourists on a tour of the site of the now-destroyed
home. The tour guide has a fan-like device that projects holographic win-
dows showing the past. The members of the tour group are ethnically
ambiguous but visually resemble the Native Americans who were previ-
ously displaced by white settler-colonists. This tour becomes, to some
degree, the motivating narrative device of the book. What the tourists are
experiencing is nothing other than a version of Here itself.
Figure 9: The Fan
We might read this tour not as the triumph of the ideology of mobile com-
puting but as the restoration of what was lost, as a return of the indige-
nous population to the land that was taken from them after the rapacious
civilization that displaced them inevitably destroyed itself. But our conso-
lation (if we find such a violent fate consoling) does not last long. Though
we get a glimpse of what might be some sort of utopian future, Here’s
human story ultimately stands against a stark background largely devoid
of human presence. That is, a yawning cosmic indifference bookends the
life of McGuire’s little house. Beginning from the affordances of our own
primitive augmented reality technology—the iPad on which we might be
reading Here itself—McGuire wants to give us access to what we might
ordinarily find difficult to keep in view: the non-human background upon
which life unfolds, the inanimate world upon which life finally depends.
McGuire wants us to imagine comics as a sort of mobile device that opens
up temporal vortexes, digitally extending the human mind, helping us
confront the universe’s indifference to us. Comics might train us to adopt
habits of mind, an orientation toward the world, that brings the past and
the future—the extreme past, the extreme future—precipitously into the
present.
Figure 10: The Marsupial
This is, I think, the ultimate significance of McGuire’s bizarre marsupial.

It’s an imaginary creature that helps us enter into something like a rela-
tionship of recognition with the vastness of the nonhuman world. If this is
true, it would not be too pretentious to say that, in the eyes of McGuire’s
alien animal, we observe the deconstruction of time.
And I do not mean the term decon struct loosely here. Rather, I have in
mind Martin Hägglund’s provocative reconstruction of Derrida’s thought
in Rad ic al Athe ism. Hägglund describes a temporal logic, which he
regards as filling out Derrida’s understanding of the relationship between
time and space, in which all presence—everything that is seemingly
present—is necessarily divided within itself. Kant’s transcendental cate-
gories, space and time, are always, in Hägglund’s view, co-implicated.
Time always becomes space and space always becomes time, a process
that Hägglund prefers to call the “spacing of time,” which is in his view
“an ‘ultratranscendental’ condition from which nothing can be exempt”
(19). Any “here” can only be “here” by virtue of its extension in time. Any
“now,” likewise, is divided between a past moment (visible as a trace) and
the future unmaking or transformation of that trace. Time can only be
registered by the spatial means of the trace, and all traces are necessarily
destructible, which implies that the future is radically open, that all posi-
tive structures or values can become negative.
“To think the tracing of time as the condition for life in general,” Hägglund
writes, “is to think a constitutive finitude, which from the very beginning
exposes life to death, memory to forgetting, identity to alterity, and so on”
(79). This notion—the notion of “autoimmunity”—holds that “everything
is threatened from within itself, since the possibility of living is insepara-
ble from the peril of dying,” and that, moreover, “[w]hatever is desired as
good is autoimmune, since it bears within itself the possibility of becom-
ing unbearably bad” (9) It is a destructibility that—because it depends on
the concept of the spacing of time—uncannily mirrors the imbrication of
time and space within and between panels that I reviewed above. I am
not, I should make clear, suggesting that McGuire was familiar with Häg-
glund or Derrida but am rather observing a family resemblance between
their understandings of the relationship between time and space. More so
than the original Raw six-pager, the book version of Here dwells on the
radical (because intrinsic) destructibility of life.
McGuire’s interest in his marsupial, I would finally insist, isn’t predictive,

any more than any other future scenario in the comic is predictive. He’s
not telling us to expect odd kangaroo-like future animals but is rather ask-
ing us to think differently about what we might call the logic of temporal
succession. If time is radically open, if everything that is good or desirable
might be—by necessity—revealed to be bad, it is not at all clear how we
might (or should) relate to this anteater creature that chews on our
remains, or how to feel about the flood that destroys our home, or what to
make of the tour group looking back upon us with the help of a holo-
graphic fan. In this way, McGuire cuts against the optimistic, technophilic
assumptions that governed the original GUI engineering he was, however
indirectly, inspired by. After all, the ultimate promise of windows-based
interfaces or augmented reality is a happy reconciliation between human
and machine. Good design supposedly makes what is alien, inaccessible,
or abstract come (often literally) into hand. It promises to domesticate an
unruly non-human reality. But these promises seem hollow in McGuire’s
hands. Instead, his user-friendly windows open onto the ambivalent logic
of autoimmunity. In Here, here always slips away, necessarily only ever
exists in relation to various nows.
Such a way of understanding the relationship between time and space

does nothing to obviate what we understand to be our ordinary or every-
day experience of life. It doesn’t mean that we should look forward to our
own destruction by climate change or throw up our hands despondently.
What Hägglund calls “radical atheism” should therefore not be mistaken
for quietism. Nothing, as far as I can tell, follows politically from this
philosophical position except the sensible view that no political struggle
comes with guarantees. Indeed, one might argue that the very possibility
of caring about the future, of being invested in one outcome over another,
depends on a prior condition of destructibility, the necessary truth that
we can lose everything. On this view, our awareness of our inability to
inhabit these larger temporalities or histories—our awareness of our own
destructibility, the necessary destructibility of everything—is the very
basis of mourning.
Mourning, Hägglund writes, is “a force that cannot be overcome and that

emanates from the love of what is mortal” (110). Whether or not we find
this account philosophically compelling, it is precisely such a love of mor-
tality—the persistence of this love not despite but because of the possibili-
ty of self-destruction—that McGuire’s art elicits. Here is, I think, most
emotionally gripping when it compels us to realize how (forgive the pun)
comically small-minded our normal, habituated understanding of life is,
how out of touch we are with historical forces (or with non-human tempo-
ralities), and yet how little guidance Here’s grand view of Deep Time
offers to the necessary, daily project of avoiding self-destruction. It is a
bracing, deflating insight that comics, in the hands of a master like
McGuire, is uniquely suited to argue for.
Notes
[i] See Chris Ware, “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’—a Grateful Apprecia-

tion,” Com ic Art 8 (2006): 5–7.
[ii] Thierry Groensteen, “Les lieux superposés de Richard

McGuire,” Urgences 32 (1991): 95–109.
Works Cited
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think,” The Atlantic. July 1945. Web. 28

Mar. 2015.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequen tial Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press,

1985. Print.
Gibson, William. Spook Coun try. New York: Putnam, 2007. Print.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Les lieux superposes de Richard McGuire.”

Urgences 32 (1991): 95–109.
–. The Sys tem of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty. Jackson, MS: University

Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print.
Hägglund, Martin. Rad ic al Athe ism: Der ri da and the Time of Life. Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Print.
Kirby, Alan. Digi mod ernism: How New Tech nolo gies Dis man tle the

Post mod ern and Recon fig ure Our Cul ture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Print.
Kuhlman, Martha B., and David M. Ball. “Introduction: Chris Ware and
the ‘Cult of Difficulty.’” In The Comics of Chris Ware: Draw ing Is a Way
of Think ing. Eds. Ball and Kuhlman. Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 2010. Print.
McGuire, Richard. Here. New York: Pantheon, 2014. Print.
–. “Here.” Raw 2, no. 1 (1989): 69–74. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Under stand ing Comics. New York: Harper Perennial,

1994. Print.
Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009.

Print.
Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning…Was the Com mand Line. New York:

William Morrow, 1999. Print.
Ware, Chris. “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’—a Grateful Appreciation.”

Com ic Art 8 (2006): 5–7. Print.
Figure 1: McGuire, Here, n.p.
Figure 2: McGuire, “Here,” in Raw, p. 70.
Figure 3: McCloud, Under stand ing Comics, p. 96.
Figure 4: Ibn al Rabin and Cidre et Schnapps, “N’ergotons plus, je vous

prie,” Les Édi tions Atra bile. <http://www.atrabile.org/ibn-al-
rabin/Fanzines/fanzine.php?titre=CidreEtSchnaps&page=17>. Rpt. in
Abstract Comics, by Andrei Molotiu (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009)
63.
Figure 5: Here, n.p.
Figure 6: Richard McGuire, “Time Warp,” New York er 24 November

2014 <https://www.newyorker.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/CoverStory-Time-Warp-Richard-McGuire-
872‑1200-13173805.jpg>.
Figure 7: Ivan Sutherland, Sketch pad: A ManMachine Graph ic al Com

mu ni ca tion Sys tem <http://www.wired.com/2013/01/grandaddy-gui/>.
Figure 8: “Xerox Alto” <http://toastytech.com/guis/altost1.jpg>.
Lee Kon stan ti nou is an assistant professor in the English Department

at the University of Maryland, College Park. He wrote the novel Pop Apoc
a lypse (Harper Perennial, 2009) and co-edited with Samuel Cohen The
Lega cy of David Fos ter Wal lace (University of Iowa Press, 2012). He
recently completed a literary-political history of American irony after
1945 (forthcoming from Harvard University Press) and has started a new
book project called “Rise of the Graphic Novel.”
Sarah Sillin, Guest Criticism Editor, received her Ph.D. from the Uni-

versity of Maryland and is currently a visiting assistant professor of Amer-
ican literature at Gettysburg College. Her book project, entitled Glob al
Sym pa thy: Rep re sent ing Nine teenthCen tu ry Amer ic ans’ For eign Rela
tions, explores how writers envisioned early Americans’ ties to the larger
world through their depictions of friendship and kinship. Sillin’s essays
have appeared in Mul tiEth nic Lit er at ure of the Unit ed States and Lit er a
ture of the Ear ly Amer ic an Repub lic.

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2/23/2019 A Theory of “Here” | The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought

C RITI C IS M / L E E KON STAN TIN OU

About halfway through Here, the experimental cartoonist Richard

Figure 1: McGuire’s far-future marsupial

McGuire first published “Here” in 1989 in Raw, an avant-garde comics

Figure 2: A page from McGuire’s 1989 “Here”

Ware tells the story of a single building in Build ing Sto ries). More impor-

Figure 3: Scott McCloud on Intra-Panel Time

The sequential arrangement of panels invites a second helpful confusion:

Figure 4: From Ibn al Rabin, Cidre et Schnapps, reprinted in Molotiu’s Abstract Comics

Panels continue, in many of the comics that Molotiu collects, to create a

design effects that transcend those created by reading panels in a strictly

Figure 5: A double-page spread from McGuire’s 2014 Here

an exaggeration to say that comics is an art of touching. And the best

Figure 6: Richard McGuire’s recent New York er cover

Figure 7: Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad

Figure 8: The Xerox Alto

(The Xerox Alto itself drew on concepts previously developed in Douglas

of the history of computation, but it was arguably even more important as

The figure of the window, meanwhile, is a spatial translation of human-

One of McGuire’s original insights was that these technically implement-

have transformed his characters’ modes of embodiment within what we

This ideal—the confluence of ubiquitous mobile computing and augment-

Figure 9: The Fan

Figure 10: The Marsupial

This is, I think, the ultimate significance of McGuire’s bizarre marsupial.

McGuire’s interest in his marsupial, I would finally insist, isn’t predictive,

Such a way of understanding the relationship between time and space

Mourning, Hägglund writes, is “a force that cannot be overcome and that

[i] See Chris Ware, “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’—a Grateful Apprecia-

[ii] Thierry Groensteen, “Les lieux superposés de Richard

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think,” The Atlantic. July 1945. Web. 28

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequen tial Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press,

Gibson, William. Spook Coun try. New York: Putnam, 2007. Print.

Groensteen, Thierry. “Les lieux superposes de Richard McGuire.”

–. The Sys tem of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty. Jackson, MS: University

Hägglund, Martin. Rad ic al Athe ism: Der ri da and the Time of Life. Stan-

Kirby, Alan. Digi mod ernism: How New Tech nolo gies Dis man tle the

McGuire, Richard. Here. New York: Pantheon, 2014. Print.

–. “Here.” Raw 2, no. 1 (1989): 69–74. Print.

McCloud, Scott. Under stand ing Comics. New York: Harper Perennial,

Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009.

Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning…Was the Com mand Line. New York:

Ware, Chris. “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’—a Grateful Appreciation.”

Figure 1: McGuire, Here, n.p.

Figure 2: McGuire, “Here,” in Raw, p. 70.

Figure 3: McCloud, Under stand ing Comics, p. 96.

Figure 4: Ibn al Rabin and Cidre et Schnapps, “N’ergotons plus, je vous

Figure 5: Here, n.p.

Figure 6: Richard McGuire, “Time Warp,” New York er 24 November

Figure 7: Ivan Sutherland, Sketch pad: A Man­Machine Graph ic al Com ­

Figure 8: “Xerox Alto” <http://toastytech.com/guis/altost1.jpg>.

Figure 9: Here, n.p.

Figure 10: Here, n.p.

Lee Kon stan ti nou is an assistant professor in the English Department

Sarah Sillin, Guest Criticism Editor, received her Ph.D. from the Uni-

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Figure 7: Ivan Sutherland, Sketch pad: A ManMachine Graph ic al Com