Week #1
The Arrival by Shaun Tan Shaun Tan’s the Arrival is a wordless graphic novel which depicts a father and his family emigrating to a fantastical foreign land. Although it does not have any dialogue, the Arrival succeeds to tell a story and deliver the characters’ emotion with its beautiful combination of realistic style and fantasy. Regarding the layout of the Arrival, it is noticeable that the novel has an unique composition using square panels aligned. This layout helps to keep the flow of panels, especially when multiple panels show the continuous motion of the characters. Similar to a storyboarding, many pages of the Arrival depict the movements in detail, such as hands, a character walking and talking, etc. This style is one of the reasons that the Arrival is able to tell a story without any dialogue since the readers can easily understand the movements in the story. Using different angles and points of view, the Arrival illustrates its beautiful world and charact