The style of Here questions objectivity: the subjective graphic novel reads as if the images came from a camera. The hallmark of the graphic novel is that its artstyle immediately signifies an artist, creating a subjective view. Indeed, the main room depicted in the novel is explored intimately. Yet, in Here, the poses and objects depicted are unexaggerated, unstylized and could be a tracing of a photograph. The square frames and fixed angle of the room are also photograph-like. If these snippets are photographs, then who is holding the camera? Who chose this location? Once the novel begins to speculate about the future, these questions rise even closer to the surface of the reading.
The panels resemble photography and not film because of the way the novel plays with time. Plays is the right word, not experiments, because the graphic novel is playful and ironic. The medium of graphic novels is one where time passes between each panel. Here, time is expanded and collapsed, sequenced and jumbled. Why individual panels travel in a certain order is not always clear, but the book travels through larger movements: historical, comparing/contrasting, and speculative. Within the novel, characters are viewed with humorous irony: they comment on their lifetimes while the reader views them as a snippet in a larger timescale. Readers, moreover, are able to flip pages back and forth to access different points in time in the novel, bringing those separate points close together in the readers’ timeline.
This is what the novel does that is so destabilizing: Here showcases the fundamental disconnect between large-scale time and human ability to comprehend that scale. The book collapses time within its pages, and asks readers to re-examine the frame of their own lives, in the lifetimes that they have. No character in Here ever transcends beyond the frames, and Here does not ask the reader to transcend their own understanding of their lifetime, either. Here instead destabilizes linear time and a fixed sense of place just enough for readers to question, just for a moment, their habitual modes of understanding time and place.
The back jacket of the novel says, “The six-page comic Here, which appeared in 1989 … was immediately recognized as a transformative work … Its influence continues to be felt”. In a surreal moment, I thought that the graphic novel I held had been published in 1989, and the projections into 2015 were eerily, accurately imagined. When I closed the book, I saw the window on the front cover. I saw the rectangular shape of the book that I was holding much like the woman in the last spread. This book is a capsule, unmoored to time and place, that a person will read and consider in an unknown future.
Climate Change in Media and Design 
Thanks for this great post, Kellie—I think you (along with Alex and Anna in the comments) bring up some very compelling points about the affordances of form, and the ways in which these intersect with and unsettle not only our perception of time but also our reading practices. The chronological “play” in which the graphic novel engages asks us readers to play, in turn. As Kellie and Alex mention, any attempt to organize different panels and pages according to a traditional timeline (to “skip back and forth”) necessarily disorganizes, or “destabilizes,” our typical linear reading practice. In reading this graphic novel, we perform a collapse of past, present, and future/beginning, middle, and end (perhaps also enacting an instance of the B-theory of time?).
Shifting into the realm of space, I was struck by your question about the choice of setting: “who chose the location?” We didn’t talk much in class about the particular environment or geographical position featured in the book. A New York Times article on the text discusses the personal tone of the work, and reveals that it’s set in Richard McGuire’s own childhood living room in Perth Amboy, New Jersey (link below). So, did the author choose the location, or—and especially given the book’s attention to memory—do we, as readers, get to inscribe our own sense of place? And how does this get complicated by the temporal jumps that make the place utterly unrecognizable/unrelatable?
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I totally agree that the book is playful with its sense of time, but I find it funny that you consider this more a trait of photography than film. While reading Here, the pseudo time-travel between pages and panels reminded me of several somewhat analogous tropes or techniques in film. Using the large background panel as the baseline or temporal ‘present’, other panels can be seen to incorporate flashbacks or flash forwards, almost as if it’s a window into the memory or even character of a place. I was strangely reminded of Back to the Future, actually — even though it’s a classic of 80s sci-fi and pop culture, it too examines the history of a place and attempts to predict its future. I most latched on to what you noted as a key difference between the two media: the ability to control where in time you focus. Films are typically viewed in linear time, so the directors and editors control which windows in time can be opened at a given time. In many films, time travel can be limited so as not to confuse or destabilize viewers. In Here, however, the book spans hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years within a single page. I read the novel straight through the first time, and I found the skipping of time very destabilizing, but upon further reads I was able to skip back and forth, following story lines as they played out across time with different eras in the background. This, I think, provides something unique to the medium itself that neither film nor photography (in their traditional senses) can provide.
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I agree with you that Here seems to “destabilize linear time”; the book reminded me of the concept of the B-theory of time, which I am not an expert on, but it essentially argues the following: that “the flow of time is an illusion, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless.” (From the Wikipedia page for B-theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-theory_of_time) In other words, the B-theory of time challenges the concept of linear time; instead, it posits that moments we think of as the “past” and the “future” are happening simultaneously with what we call the “present.”
As I was reading Here, I flipped back and forth a number of times, and I considered how much easier it would be to read if all of the images appeared on their own, in chronological order—telling a clear, linear story of a specific location. By avoiding that traditional structure and “destabilizing” linear time, I think McGuire offers a much more interesting, challenging, and provocative book.
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