CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)
By:
November 14, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR
Sometimes all someone needs to make their mark is a proof of concept. Richard McGuire was part of a cluster of musicians who moved to New York City after they graduated from Rutgers. They made a record of experimental doodles as Liquid Idiot, then another as Idiot Orchestra. When they started playing at dance-punk clubs in the early ’80s, they changed their name to Liquid Liquid. By that point, they’d become a bass/percussion/marimba/voice quartet that focused on groove and texture rather than “songs” as such: capturing a gesture, spinning it out for a couple of minutes, then cutting it off once they’d established how it worked.
Liquid Liquid only recorded a handful of EPs and singles, but they sounded so little like anyone else’s dance music, then or at any other time, that they’ve remained shockingly fresh. McGuire’s bass hook on the band’s best-known recording, “Cavern” — which became the musical basis of Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines” — is Downtown NYC funk, no wave and minimalist composition distilled down to two notes. Liquid Liquid’s records became music-nerd grails; the Beastie Boys’ label Grand Royal collected their discography on a single CD in 1997, and there’s a needle drop of their track “Scraper” in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
McGuire also designed posters for Liquid Liquid’s gigs, and had a real knack for that, too. At the same time as he was wheatpasting them around town, he was putting up pieces of street art, with silhouetted cartoon bodies and cryptic phrases. His work appeared in the Invitational and Xerox Art Show that Keith Haring put together, and in the New York/New Wave show at P.S. 1. He left Liquid Liquid in 1983 (though he’s played in occasional reunions); by the late ’80s, he was mostly doing graphic design and art, and dabbled in comics. Well, “dabbled”: his first published comics story, the six-page “Here”, which first appeared in 1989’s RAW vol. 2 #1, is a formalist masterpiece that’s been anthologized repeatedly.
The initial version of “Here” was 36 panels that show the same space at various points in time, subdividing each image into fragments that are years or centuries apart. Later, McGuire reworked it from that proof-of-concept form into a 300-page book that was published in 2014. (His web site calls it “an artist book disguised as a graphic novel”; a film adaptation with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright came out in 2024.) His other narrative comics work has been both minimal and minimalist: just a few more short stories and a couple of art books, several of which are composed of silhouettes of Popeye and Olive Oyl’s bodies.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | Sangamithra Iyer on MADHUR ANAND, LITERARY ECOLOGIST | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!