Week 1: The Arrival

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is pure visual storytelling. Everything is told through character body language and visual tone. The main character comes from a dark and dreary town overrun with giant black lizards of some sort, but the new city he ventures to has a less dark tone and more bright ones. This is the same case for all of the immigrants that the main character interacts within the new world. The architecture of where he’s from is simple and drab, just houses in rows, while the city is made up of many different shapes. It is intimidating, but also full of hope and potential for the protagonist. This also makes it clear when the other immigrants he meets are having a flashback, coupled with a zoom-in shot in the present day that fades into their memories.

The one drawback of not having dialogue is that there isn’t a lot of room for subtle acting. The faces and body language of the characters have to be explicit enough for the reader to understand, but not too cliché that it doesn’t feel natural. One way that the author keeps visual interest on the characters in the panel is to draw the people semi-realistically while the backgrounds and animals/monsters are more illustrative. This acts as a cut-out effect that other comic artists do, but it is usually that the characters are more cartoony while the backgrounds are more realistic.

While Shaun Tan’s narrative is mainly based around immigration into Australia, it is clear that he also took inspiration from the Ellis Island immigration. Although The Arrival may not be speaking solely about the New York City experience, it still felt very familiar to me. I was born and raised in New York and have visited the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island. My great-grandparents also came through Ellis Island from Italy and ran a grocery when they came to the states. In school, it had been championed that our city, our country, was a melting pot of many different cultures. The echoes of my family and friends’ history can be heard in this book.