Week 1: "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan

When most people think of graphic novels they probably imagine many of the comic book volume paperbacks or hardcovers you can find amongst the shelves in many book stores which are littered with colorful visuals and tons of dialogue bubbles to read. Many visual novels rely on a combination of images and speech boxes to help tell their story but not a lot truly rely on imagery alone.

            The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a magical little graphic novel whose beautiful visuals tell the story of a man and his family who’ve immigrated to a new, strange land. While the visuals alone are striking and wonderfully drawn, what makes Tan’s novel so well done is the fact that he relies on visuals to tell his story. There isn’t one piece of dialogue anywhere.

            Tan’s detailed and carefully drawn out panels each show scenes that help rely the story to the reader through the character’s actions, important objects, visual focal points, showing specific events, etc. It is through what is seen that you understand what is going on in the story and it’s so well done that you can quickly gather what’s going on in each panel. Not one word of dialogue was needed.

            What also makes The Arrival such a great visual novel is that uses bizarre visuals to depict how everything the main character is experiencing is something new and almost otherworldly. The whole novel is a visual metaphor of how truly alien it is to come to a new country. Despite how odd the visuals become it’s still easy for the reader to follow along and understand what’s going on in the story. This is especially true for when the main character meets and talks to new people. We are shown a few panels that give a backstory to these characters and while the imagery is strange or outlandish at times we still understand the meaning behind what’s being shown to us without any dialogue.

            The method of relying on visuals also lends a better connection to the main character and an understanding of what its like to come to a new country whose language and culture you don’t understand. You have to rely on what you see, now what you can hear or read.

            The Arrival is a fantastic story and is a beautiful testament to the wonder of a purely visual graphic novel. I could only hope for more novels like it.