Book comments: The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

[ceri]

I'd heard about this from the comics blogosphere last year but only got to see it this last week. Shaun Tan is a Chinese-Australian artist, and The Arrival is the wordless story of an immigrant's experiences in a strange new land. It's a seamless blend of tight realism and soaring fantasy, and it moved me very deeply.

What you want to do is go look at Tan's website for the page about this book. Then you should go get a copy, because the oversize, high-quality production of the book lets the illustrations shine very much more than these reduced images can convey. 

Comments

[dingsi]

Oh YES. That book is so amazing. And worth every penny.
I hope it doesn't come off as superficial when I say that I'm also really grateful for the gorgeous art -- it's not that the story wouldn't be worth telling anyway, of course it would, but I really dig it when comics take the visual part of sequential storytelling seriously and deliver, for a lack of a better word, some eyecandy.
I also loved the decision to make up alphabets and symbols so you cannot read the language, either. Or make simple, everday machines look alien and strange so you'd be just as confused about which buttons to press. This book doesn't make it easy for you, and that's good.

[ceri]

Yup. You can read all the fantastic elements as the guy's internal experience, or as a genuinely fantastic environment, or any mix thereof, and it works.