Rising seas in a Perth Amboy living room

Comics scholar Philip Smith positions Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here within the "cli-fi" genre—"science fiction which addresses the actuality of climate change" in the new issue of INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. Here's Smith:

"Within the span of just a century, all traces of humanity have vanished. By allowing past, present, future frames to permeate one another, McGuire seems to offer a grand thesis on our historical naiveté. As human beings we are trapped within our own temporal and cultural frames. Just as individuals living in the twentieth century cannot fully conceive of a buffalo, or a dinosaur, in the space which is now their living room, neither can we conceive of the reoccupation of our domestic space by the natural world."

Richard McGuire's Here appeared initially as an experimental black and white strip in avant garde comics magazine RAW in 1989. He revisited the comic for the full-color graphic novel that was published in 2014 by Pantheon Books. Read my post on Here. Another post on a recent INKS article about Will Eisner and Jack Katz is here.

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Here image © 2014 Richard McGuire for Pantheon Books. Get the new issue of INKS. Disclosure, I guess: I am a member of the Comics Studies Society.