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Loading... Here (2014)by Richard McGuire
Work InformationHere by Richard McGuire (2014)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Wow. Kinda creepy, kinda sweet. I keep thinking about it which is always a thrill with a book. I'm sure I'll look at it many more times. Not much of a review I guess, just get the book. If you don't like it maybe give it as a housewarming present, it's just so cool. ( ) A very clever book depicting the events occurring in a singular location over hundreds of thousands of years. Many sketches on each page show simultaneous situations in varied years. Following the storylines is sometimes tricky, but many scenes show the universality of human experience over time. It's something you've never seen before! I wouldn’t give it many points for the quality of its dialogue or even many of the juxtapositions designed here, since it seems to present a simple and not all that novel message by the end, but the novelty of its experimentation with time and space is still very much fascinating for a short 300 pages. This is an adult graphic novel, the second one I have read. I am now officially a fan. The book is the story of the corner of a room and all the events that have occurred there in the last hundreds of thousands of years. Some pages show multiple events using windows into time. It's hard to explain, but I loved it.
I tend to think of it as a comics truism that the shorter way is always, always the best way to tell a story, but maybe Here, six pages that became hundreds, is the exception that proves the rule. By patiently teasing out a more or less complete historical and poetic context for the patch of land he sets his story down on, returning to characters and scenes again and again while simultaneously showing us the circumstances that brought them forth, McGuire transcends the quick, “gotcha!” feel of the original short and turns a formal exercise into something as rich with character and anecdote and forward motion as any more traditional novel. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Richard McGuire's Here is the story of a corner of a room and the events that happened in that space while moving forward and backward in time. The book experiments with formal properties of comics, using multiple panels to convey the different moments in time. Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic toy that resembles the same dinosaur in the year 1999. Conversations appear to be happening between two people who are centuries apart. Someone asking, "Anyone seen my car keys?" can be "answered" by someone at a future archeology dig. Cycles of glaciers transform into marshes, then into forests, then into farmland. A city develops and grows into a suburban sprawl. Future climate changes cause the land to submerge, if only temporarily, for the long view reveals the transient nature of all things. Meanwhile, the attention is focused on the most ordinary moments and appreciating them as the most transcendent"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)741.5The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, ComicsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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