Housing crisis time in two graphic narratives: Richard McGuire’s "Here" and Chris Ware’s "Building stories"

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to apply crisis studies, housing studies and hauntology to conduct an analysis of Richard McGuire’s Here (2014) and Chris Ware’s Building stories (2012a). These two graphic narratives address times of global crises by employing houses and other animate and inanimate characters as spectral figures to visualize both near and deep futures. The paper demonstrates how McGuire’s and Ware’s spatiotemporal structures, rooted in the local, the personal and even the small-scale, engage with the most pressing topics of our times. Building stories responds to the 2008 financial crash and the housing and other homelessness-related crises, while envisioning a mid-22nd-century America affected by climate change. The climate crisis is also imagined in Here through depictions of rising ocean levels in the early 22nd century, and of human extinction caused by a nuclear crisis in the early 24th century. Both works express contemporary anxieties about an increasingly inhospitable near future as well as the unthinkable, posthuman deep future. By situating crises within domestic spaces, the authors not only bring global challenges closer to home and raise an alarm, however. The paper argues that, at the same time, both books can be said to domesticate crisis anxiety by providing comic relief, offering not only humor, irony, and play, but also aesthetic pleasure. The aesthetic dimension is derived from the fact that, while addressing global crises, both authors overcome the crisis of form and representation by celebrating the medium of the comic book itself. The authors experiment with the medium’s conventions, radically employing its inherently fragmentary nature to construct highly non-linear, interactive works. The texts capture elusive events and present polycentric multispecies histories that involve human, posthuman, more- or other-than-human points of view. Although McGuire and Ware pursue this aim differently, they both engage in metareflection on narrative and time: from the eternal present of art to the planet’s deep past and deep future in Here, from the near past to near future in Building stories, and through constant change in both.