Originally published in 1989, Richard McGuire's six-page black-and-white comic "Here" offered a definitive demonstration of comics' secret weapon—the ability to transcend time. The reader's perspective in "Here" focused on a single corner of a single house in a series of nested panels, each displaying the same location in a different year: a dead mouse in a trap in 1999, an old man in 1986, and a stegosaurus in "100,650,010 BC." Time is the narrative device that unlocks the significance of the otherwise pedestrian place. "Here" turned out to be six of the most influential pages in comics history, heavily influencing the work of world-class cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Lynda Barry.

Now, a quarter-century later, McGuire has published a book-length version of "Here," a full-color, 300-page expansion of his original story. This Here (Pantheon Books, $35) is a beautiful book with some interesting changes to the adaptation—McGuire has blown each "panel" up to the size of two pages, making the "corner" of the room into the fold between the pages. All the extra space allows McGuire to examine many other time periods, to embed longer narratives within the framework of the story, and to bring the rhythm of an epic novel to his once-brief experiment.

Unfortunately, Here is inferior to "Here" in almost every way. Blowing each panel up to two pages robs the story of its energy, and deprives the piece of the very time manipulation that made it so significant to begin with. In "Here," a reader could be an omniscient time traveler, focusing on a single panel while still seeing forward and backward slices of narrative out of the corner of her eye. Here makes you turn a page to see what comes next, or what came before. Any book can do that.