Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’
This has been doing the rounds recently, but I thought I’d post it up anyway. From Monsters & Rockets;
Nobody who has read Richard McGuire’s 1989 comic stripHere has ever forgotten it. (Originally printed in Raw: Vol. 2, Number 1, it’s more recently been reprinted in Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. ) A truly mind-bending work, the strip jumps around in time but not in space, showing us various events occurring on a little patch of land over the course of billions of years.Here is formally daring but also surprisingly moving, dropping us into random moments in the lives of the people who have called “here” their home.
I’ve been a big fan of the strip for years, but I had no idea that it had inspired a short film. This is apparently a student work, but it’s hardly amateurish. To say it’s perhaps half as good as the original is not a bad thing when the original is this great. Still, I strongly suggest you read the original on this site before watching the film. You’ll never look at your home in quite the same way again.
[…] more from the original source: Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ Filed under Comic Strip Tags:1989-comic, comic-strip, land-over, little-patch, over-the-course, […]
[…] in McGuire’s comic ‘Here’ with the RIT students filmic adaptation (The Comic Bureau http://thecomicsbureau.co.uk/?p=912 […]
[…] Although cinema and comics have an often similar reliance on visuals and sometimes words, they are experienced in entirely different ways. The reader creates a sense of time through the effects of closure in comics – the reader understands time through linking together two panels into a narrative (see McCloud here). Unlike comics in which panel sizes differ to tell the story, cinema works through a specific sized screen – compare the differences in McGuire’s comic ‘Here’ with the RIT students filmic adaptation (The Comic Bureau http://thecomicsbureau.co.uk/?p=912 ) […]
[…] McGuire is best known to the comics world for his ground-breaking Here, a six page comic published in RAW Magazine in 1989. Those six pages are easily remembered by […]