Comics Alternative

On this episode of The Comics Alternative, Derek and Andy review three new and exciting titles. First, they look at Richard McGuire's Here (Pantheon) a project that actually goes back to 1989. A different, black-and-white 6-page version of the comic appeared in the first issue of Raw Vol. 2,  Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's groundbreaking comics anthology that ran from 1980 until 1991. The new book doesn't include or build directly off of that original comic, but it does use the design and concept as a springboard into the larger, more ambitious project. Everything that takes place in this story -- and the guys use the word of "story" loosely, here -- is anchored in one physical space, the corner of a room. What McGuire does is to give us a history of that particular space, revealing events that took place in that area over a span of centuries. The "movement" within the narrative is strictly temporal, reaching back into the prehistoric past (the earliest year being 3,000, 500, 000 BCE) and pushing into a