And the structure was organic, nodding not only to the medium’s past but also hinting at its future. And it wasn’t just my mind: “Here” blew apart the confines of graphic narrative and expanded its universe in one incendiary flash, introducing a new dimension to visual narrative that radically departed from the traditional up-down and left-right reading of comic strips. Sitting on that couch, I felt time extend infinitely backwards and forwards, with a sense of all the biggest of small moments in between. It was the first time I had had my mind blown. Across six black-and-white pages, it simply pictured the corner of a room from a fixed viewpoint, projecting a parade of moments, holidays, people, animals, biology, geology – everything, it seems, that defines and lends human life meaning – on to windows of space labelled by year (1971, 1957, 1999, 100,097BC). While many of the strips that defined RAW could be characterised as experimentally expressionistic or stylistically sophisticated, this one was bland and approachable, even homey. For a young student of painting with ambitions to tell serious comic-strip stories, the annual appearance of the magazine in which Spiegelman’s “Maus” was being serialised was a genuine event – like a gallery show, but exploring a medium that at that time had yet to be afforded aesthetic legitimacy.Ī short story, “Here”, caught my eye. The ninth issue of the experimental comics magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, had been released, and I’d bought it at a local comics shop and brought it home to read, safe from the scrutiny of the University of Texas fine arts department. I know exactly where I was: sitting on a tattered couch in the living room of my rental house in Austin, Texas, 1989.

Here by Richard McGuire