FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 6 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G Stories come to us in many shapes. Nearly every art form, utilitarian or not, is at some point bound to a critical reading that asserts that it is narrative: dance, music, painting, even architecture have been saddled with that ennobling but burdensome label. As much as we as viewers or listeners can learn to appreciate abstraction, our minds tend to seek a storyline. The most common systems for telling stories, of course, are language and art. If we agree that these two principal expressions of human creative intellectual e√ort, picture making and language, evolved simultaneously – in the form of pictograms, cuneiform, hieroglyphics – then it is interesting (or at least intriguing) to ponder how one form gained supremacy over the other as our primary system for expressing narratives. What I am really talking about is one speci fic and vexing issue that persists in our modern world: why so few people give comic books and graphic novels the respect they are due. Yes, Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Prize and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was one of the best-reviewed books of H e r e , by Richard McGuire (Pantheon, 304 pp., $35) 1 6 4 Y O U N G Y its decade, but by and large stories told with pictures have not made significant ingress onto best-seller lists. Ever since comic books were excoriated as instruments intended to seduce the innocent by the psychologist Fredric Wertham in the 1950s, there have been rallying movements by artists and cartoonists to reclaim the value of the serial graphic narrative form. One of the most important outlets for experimental comic art over the past forty years was RAW, the brainchild of Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, which aimed to express and elicit an intellectual appreciation of alternative graphic art. This selfproclaimed ‘‘graphix magazine of postponed suicides’’ eventually came to focus on long-form comic stories, launching or supporting the careers of artists such as Sue Coe, Gary Panter, Julie Doucet, and Charles Burns. The most influential work to appear in RAW may have been ‘‘Here’’ by Richard McGuire, published in volume 2, issue 1, in 1989. This six-page, thirty-six-panel story, in black and white, looked at first glance as if it were just another avant-garde comic tale. Instead, it was a startling experiment with time and space. It had a single setting – the corner of a suburban house. It had characters, but in the fifth panel another scene popped up in front of the narrative, then another pair of ‘‘windows’’ appeared – all of these distinguished by years noted at their top left corners. The story being told seemed to be multiplied across time but not space. It was all happening in the same room – or, more accurately, at the extremes of the scale of time in the same open vista. A first-time viewing of McGuire’s original ‘‘Here’’ in 2015 might call to mind the work of one of our other great national comic artists, Chris Ware, creator of an ever-expanding universe of brilliant illustrative expression. That connection would not be incorrect, but the chronology of influence must be kept in order. Ware credits McGuire with opening his eyes to the temporal and spatial possibilities of graphic storytelling when he was a young artist, something Ware himself has explored with great success. Ware, in an essay expressing his admiration for McGuire, calls him a genius for breaking the traditional hold that linearity had on comic stories – and making a work that functions ‘‘closer to real memory and experience than anything that had come before in comics.’’ That appreciation, shared by a great number of readers F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 6 5 R and other artists, had to be leavened by a large measure of patience , as McGuire worked on an expanded, color version of his story over the years. The fully realized version of Here...