WEEK 1: THE ARRIVAL BY SHAUN TAN

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, a beautiful "silent" comic. Unlike most comics, The Arrival contains no dialogue between characters that could be read except through assumptions.

This is my second time reading this book. My initial reaction was fascination. I've never really read a comic that had no words. There would be times when it was at least one panel that had a dialogue bubble but if that were to happen in this story, I feel like it would take away from the unspoken stories.

 

 

One small thing I noticed the second time I read it was this one part when the main protagonist learns about the backstory of one of the immigrates he meets. Even in class we talked about his part and the class thought she was talking about bringing her daughter there but when I looked at it again, she was talking about her life before coming to the new place. The “daughter” was actually her younger self.

Another thing I noticed after discussing in class was, why we are able to “read” this non-verbal comic?



Each illustration is fully detailed and sometimes sequenced like a storyboard or a frame in a movie. Shown below is an example of how Tan utilized this method showing the characters continuously in different poses or motion and either drawing each frame in different perspectives of the characters. In our minds, we can interpret what is happening in between these illustrations like when reading we might add words to broken sentence.

But how are we able to know what makes a sentence? We learn from our parents what is consider the correct way such as sequencing. Almost everything we learn growing up is sequential from learning the alphabet to counting. We never start at Z or 5, we always start from A to Z and 1, 2, 3.