Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire (born 1957 in New Jersey) is an American graphic novelist, artist, and musician. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Le Monde, and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library & Museum. His comic "Here" (first published in 1989) is among the most lauded comics from recent decades, with an updated graphic novel version published by Pantheon Books in December 2014. A film adaptation of Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, was released in 2024.

Biography McGuire was born and raised in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University.

Soon after graduating college, McGuire and a group of friends formed the band Liquid Idiot before relocating to Manhattan in 1979, where the group reformed as the dance-punk band Liquid Liquid, with McGuire serving as the band's bassist. The group disbanded in 1983 but reformed in 2008 and have played in multiple countries.

McGuire's early art career was as a street artist in the vibrant 1980s East Village scene. He participated in the landmark 1981 "New York/New Wave" group exhibition at PS1 in Long Island City, alongside notable figures such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Byrne.

McGuire's first cover for The New Yorker was published in 1993; from 2006 to 2011 his work appeared regularly on the magazine's covers.

In 2001, McGuire made two limited-edition, screenprinted artist's books for the French publisher Cornelius. The first one, Popeye and Olive, was an "abstract love story". In the second book, P + O, McGuire "rearranged the silhouetted shapes of the two characters into new combinations which became a 'vocabulary of the relationship'." In 2023 an offset edition of Popeye and Olive was published by Fotokino.

In 2009, McGuire was awarded The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library.