The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

The brilliant thing about The Arrival is that the absence of any dialogue or legible text is not merely an arbitrary limitation by the author, but a deliberate device used to emphasize the sense of finding yourself in a strange and alien world, where you can't speak the language or possibly even read.

Although much of the story is modeled after the sort of archetypical story of an impoverished worker immigrating to America, with imagery that recalls the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, The Arrival is designed as a universal story. The intent is for the work both to resonate with those who have experienced the struggles of traveling to a new world, but also to capture and communicate the experience to those who may never even have left their home country. The fantastical machinery and fanciful flora and fauna evoke a world that is strange and confusing, but also full of wonder and bright promise.

The Arrival is told in a unique format, which fits somewhere in between a traditional comic book and an illustrated story. The book alternates between large full-page illustrations, and pages of small panels laid out on a grid. The full-page illustrations are usually large-scale landscapes, depicting either the grand, sometimes bewildering New World, or else the dark and oppressive Old World. In either case, these large illustrations invite the reader to take their time admiring the drawings closely, to study them as one would a singular drawing, and to soak in the mood and tone of the world.

The smaller panels are used when a bit more clarity of story-telling is needed, either by showing a sequence of events over a short period of time, or creating a montage of small glimpses into an event over a longer period of time. One particularly striking example is when an entire page full of thumbnail sketches of clouds is used to express the protagonist's journey over the ocean to the New World. It is neither needed or expected that these panels would be "read" in linear order, and yet the layout of the images clearly communicates the passage of a long period of time. And although it is clear that nothing very interesting happens during this time, the feeling of looking to the sky day by day reflects the protagonist's hopes and expectations for the New World.

Of course, the smaller panels can also be used simply to convey a mood, as on the very first page. Here, there is no passage of time implied between each of the panels; instead, the focus on small snippets of the room sets the mood for the opening scene, as well as drawing our attention to certain important story points such as the boat ticket, the packed suitcase, the family portrait, and the origami bird. In any case, this alternation between small panels and large drawings is used throughout the book to create contrast. The Juxtaposition of the grand with the mundane, of the colossal with the miniscule show how both perspectives effect our lives. It shows how it may be the big things that we will always remember, but it may be the little things that seem the strangest, or the most familiar, or mean the most to us.