Space and sequence: a topography of "here"

Richard McGuire’s Here, an “artist book disguised as a graphic novel”, follows single viewpoint over multimillenial timespan. Pursuing potential storylines on several apparently incompatible levels (gestural, historical, evolutionary, cosmic), this ostensibly simple concept provides broad template for exploring non-linear narrative capacities of printed media: it could be examined non-anthropocentric visualization chronotope (Bakhtin), SF staging espacement (Derrida), exemplary ergodic text (Aarseth), exercise in tactile multimodality or collage fiction (Gibbons). The common ground these perspectives is the material framework codex: corner room depicted majority Here’s pages structurally limits potentially endless diversity content, while also metonymically playing upon its own isomorphic relation to three-dimensional object. This disrupts temporality reading and storytelling variety ways, article focuses ambivalent position regarding factors sequence simultaneity, spatiality. Keywords: comics, novel, speculative fiction, spatiality, book,