User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/Here

• Recommended and lended to me by Senka
• Read June 2024 (short story), December 2024 (book)

Here is a comic showing the same location at different moments in time. Crucially, these different time fragments are not ordered chronologically, but shown side by side as subpanels in one panel.

Originally a comic published in 1989, it is an experiment breaking one fundamental characteristic of comics. As Scott McCloud notes in Chapter 4 of Understanding Comics:

In learning to read comics, we all learned to read time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same. (McCloud, 1994)

Usually, we understand time in a comic as passing between frames, or in the reading direction within a frame. The erratic jumps in time within panels provides an experience that I have not had before in a comic. And it isn't just for show, this format is used to full effect. We get to see the construction of the house, and the demolition. We get to see different people living in this location, we get to see a glimpse of their culture and the perpetual change this is subject to. We are confronted with the timelessness of the human experience (the birth of a child, waging war). We are confronted with the timelessness of earth and the incomprehensibly small part humans play in its history.

From these descriptions, you can see: it is a story about being human. About the virtues and vices of being human, about culture, about historical awareness. By not portraying these threads in order, or even interwovenly, a reader experiences it all at once. This is an overwhelming experience, but it is faithfull to the experience of such awareness; you get caught up in the middle of it. (This seems to be increasingly true for the current media landscape.)

Three panels from Here (1989) (not in their original sequence)

The book, a 2014 graphic novel adaptation of the comic, takes more time for these threads to play out. This is an ironic use of the word time. What I mean to say is: more physical pages are used, and on average, fewer subpanels are used. In my experience, the books tells a different story, or stories. It gets to elaborate on some threads we would see only one snippet of in comic form, and expand that to a multi-page story vignette. In doing so, I didn't experience the same overwhelming existential awareness. But in return, I did experience a curiosity of how ... And this curiosity was often rewarded by surprising connections. For example, we get to see 6 family photos taken between 1957 to 1983. In different subpanels on these pages, we see a child doing a somersault. To have time fly by so fast in one part of the page and for it to slow down in another, really touched me.

[Now, there's also a movie adaptation currently screening... Morbid curiosity ensues]