A fascinating and engaging graphic novel about the history of one room in one house, over many years.

(All images from: www.richard-mcguire.com)

This has to be one of the most imaginative, ground-breaking and emotive graphic novels that I’ve ever read; a true work of art.

Published in 2014, Here by Richard McGuire, is a sort of time-traveling graphic novel that goes back and forth in years, decades and centuries, often depicting several different snapshots of multiple years all on the same page, and in just one room of a single house (as shown above and below).

The New York Times said:

“Here” is the ­comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation of the spirit of place, a family drama under the gaze of eternity and a ghost story in which all of us are enlisted to haunt and be haunted in turn.

The Guardian said:

At one point, a dinosaur wanders across the pages; at another, the author ponders a future apocalypse. In between, there are walk-on parts for generations of McGuire relatives (we’re in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he grew up); for Benjamin Franklin, who on the eve of the American revolution travelled to a house nearby to argue with his estranged son; and for the Lenape, the Native Americans who inhabited Delaware before the arrival of the European settlers. McGuire treats time as a hopscotch-playing child treats a pavement: he parcels it into squares, and then jumps all over it.

Wired said:

With a cozy fireplace on one end and a window on the other, Here takes place in one corner of one room. Within those walls, we watch as couples quarrel, children play, a cat wanders, and a dinosaur roams. The location never changes, but the clock does—giving snapshots from millions of years ago to decades into the future. Most pages aren’t limited to one time period, and panels within panels allow the reader to cut through space to see what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. It is, to say the least, awesome.

Get your hands on a copy. You won’t regret it.