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Shaun Tan's The Arrival is a beautiful, beautiful thing.


For someone with so little connection to immigration -- my family has lived in the country for generations on all sides and have virtually no idea where they originated from -- The Arrival perfectly replicated the feeling of being in an alien place and trying to make a home for yourself and, potentially, your family. That Tan chose to communicate this wordlessly, mostly removing the language that plays such an essential role in feeling out of place, is even more impressive. Tan creates his own vocabulary of symbols and letters, allowing for the book to be completely universal, as long as you can see pictures.

Tan's expansive cities, built like the mash-up of clock cogs and Aztec pyramids, abstract paintings and hieroglyphics, feel wondrous and intimidating. The host of statues whose meanings are never explained draw up echos of foreign landmarks that visitors will never comprehend. Food is confusing and strange, a feeling you can replicate by entering many of the restaurants in the Village. Even the method of obtaining the food is alien; I recall being with a group of friends in a Japanese restaurant as the waiter explained how to eat the food, not simply what it was that they were eating. The delightful animal companions feel particularly relevant to me. I had friends who recently returned from Turkey and they observed that stray dogs and cats were neutered, tagged, given food and shelter, played with -- but not kept as pets. The idea that someone would keep an animal as a companion was illogical, even though those animals were respected. Similarly, I'm always astounded by how tourists react to squirrels. We take the little creatures for granted, as they live in such a large part of our nation and are so friendly here in NYC, but many foreign tourists have never seen squirrels, or at least never so close. The relationship citizens have with pot-inhabiting animals in the novel is not one we're comfortable with (would you befriend any animal that might live in a small space in your house?), but it becomes familiar during the story.

The "heavier" aspects of the story also have a beautiful sense of economy to them, particularly the protagonist's sadly comical search for a job and the dark back stories to several of his fellow immigrants. Whether it is a dark "dragon" that floats above the city or massive vacuuming gasmen or a aimless march to war, the conflicts ring true without evoking a single historical instance. Of course, this is The Arrival's brilliance: this is not an immigrant's tale, but The Immigrant's Tale.

From a technical standpoint, Tan's artwork is strong, but unconventional. On a "traditional" comic, his meticulous pencil work and photograph-quality figure work would look overly static and posed in almost every case, but for a story that evokes the photographic quality of memories, snapshots, and moments, it is perfect. The sheer amount of skill needed to tell a coherent story in pictures alone is unbelievable. Browse any comic news site and take a look at the inked, unlettered pages of mainstream books. Even the masters of mainstream sequential storytelling cannot tell stories alone. You may understand the groundwork and pace of the story, but I defy you to imagine what the character is saying or thinking behind the grins and grimaces, or even what kind of time is passing from panel to panel. Tan slows scenes down a beat, showing movement on a much closer micro-level so that the flow from panel to panel is never lost. Alternatively, he chooses single images that capture moments perfectly and do not require time to convey emotion and narrative.


It's a shame that many readers would flip through The Arrival hastily, moving past the beautiful storytelling in each panel in search of text or flashy action. When I gave someone Asterios Polyp, a similarly monumental graphic novel that relies heavily on images, color, and design to tell its tale, I was astonished that it took him only about twenty minutes to finish its several hundred pages. I expressed disbelief that he actually read it. "I read every word," he said. He might technically be right, but I am sure he missed thousands of "words" in every image. The Arrival has millions.