Week 1 Wordless Comics

Shaun Tan's, The Arrival is able to tell a story without using words by using a series of detailed picture panels that fit together to make the narrative understandable to the reader. It is often said “a picture is worth a thousand words” and in the case of this story, there are hundreds of pictures that are pieced together to tell a story without the use of any text or speech bubbles. For example, at the beginning of the story, you see a house, someone packing a suitcase, and 3 people. By looking at these images, I am able to understand that someone is packing for a trip and that there is a family of three (mother, father, and daughter) but only the father is going on the trip because there is a panel where the father is no longer with the mother and daughter. Tan uses both large full-page images as well as multiple small images on a page together which gives a sense of movement to the story. Without words, I still have an understanding of emotions as well by looking at the facial expressions and gestures of the characters. The sepia of the images and the dark shadows can point to the idea that immigration can be a dark, sad, and isolating experience. The story depicts immigration, a man leaves his family to go to another place, a strange and surreal world. I am able to see that the man struggles to fit into the new world that he moved to without any words explaining so. While I don’t know the names of the characters or the circumstance as to why the man is leaving his family behind, I am able to imagine parts of the story.  The images of this graphic novel manage to draw me in without a written story, its engaging and it evokes emotion from me.