The Arrival...

From The Arrival by Shaun Tan

A few years back I succumbed to an impulse that had been itching me since I was in college; I began looking at graphic novels. Perhaps it was a combination of a college friend who implored me to read Sandman, a boss who was obsessed with Batman, countless hours of reading and listening to children's stories as my kids devoured books of all kinds, and/or a colleague who began teaching the graphic novel in high school ELA. But at some point I became less ashamed to admit that a great graphic novel was on my list of what-I-did-over-summer-vacation conversations with my students in 9th and 10th grade.

The turning point for me was when I "read" the wordless book The Arrival by Shaun Tan. I was floored by how this book sucked me in, resulting in multiple quick-succession reads. My son and I spend hours talking about the drawings (while I felt an intense jealousy of Mr. Tan's abilities). I had a light bulb moment when I asked my very young (maybe four year's old?) daughter to tell me the story she saw in the panels. Her rendering of the tale was so full of insight I had to credit the author with presenting us with something unique and wondrous while simultaneously accessible and familiar. I have yet to use the book in my 10th grade class as a fiction of the immigration story, but I have turned many of my charges on to Mr. Tan's body of work.

I started this blog years ago in an attempt to learn something new in the world of "tools for communication". Three of us jumped in one afternoon and crafted the first run of blogs that would eventually develop into:

• Murder Ballad Monday: Reflections on the tougher side of old, weird America (and the British Isles) 

• Greylock Snow Day: The expert weather predictors at Greylocksnowday have been forecasting the likelihood of snow days since the Blizzard of 1978. In that time, we have correctly predicted delays, early dismissals, and full snow days at an amazing 97.65% rate.

From The Arrival by Shaun Tan

• "History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.": My blog which I neglected to feed and which withered up to die a sad unobserved interwebs death... 

The first two are quite successful in having developed avid followings, and each in their own way are excellent examples of quality story telling. Referencing The Arrival as a comeback post for my defunct blog seems appropriate. It is both random and purposeful, which sums up precisely what I strive to be daily. It is about a man who "is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope."

Good story telling is an art. Story is at the heart of what I do, teaching social studies, and I have been thinking about how to improve my story telling lately, learning from my talented story telling colleagues. There is a lot of study, debate, and reaction to an education system that has yet to agree on what, how, and why we do what we do. What I have come to understand is that as we have strived for increasing coverage, we have sacrificed story. My professional work is to find balance, but on my summer vacation, reading work like The Arrival is gloriously delightful and meaningful.

Here is Wikipedia's entry:

The Arrival (graphic novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a wordless "graphic novel" published by Hodder's Children's books in 2006. The book is 128 pages long and divided into six chapters; it is composed of small, medium, and large panels, and often features pages of full artwork. It features an immigrant’s life in an imaginary world that sometimes vaguely resembles our own. Without the use of dialogue or text, Tan portrays the experience of a father immigrating to a new land.^[1] Tan differentiates The Arrival from children's picture books, explaining that there's more emphasis on continuity in texts with multiple frames and panels, and that a "graphic novel" text like his more closely resembles a film making process.^[2] Shaun Tan has said he wanted his book to build a kind of empathy in readers: "In Australia, people don’t stop to imagine what it’s like for some of these refugees. They just see them as a problem once they’re here, without thinking about the bigger picture. I don’t expect the book to change anybody’s opinion about things, but if it at least makes them pause to think, I’ll feel as if I’ve succeeded in something."^[3]

Synopsis[edit]

The Arrival tells a universal story of immigration. The protagonist, a young man, leaves his troubled homeland in search of a new home for his wife and daughter. His homeland is haunted by shadowy, spiky tails that weave in and out of the city, giving the sense that he is trying to help his family escape a malevolent force. In subsequent parts of the book, the man encounters cultural and language barriers characterized by strange creatures and unrecognizable objects, making it a struggle for him to find work and room and board. The man also encounters friendly strangers that share their accounts of immigrating from troubled homelands. The "graphic novel" conveys messages of solitude, alienation, and hope in a foreign land.^[4]

Style[edit]

Tan sets the mood of each scene with sepia-tone color schemes, ranging from grayscale to bright gold. The illustrations are reminiscent of aged photos, and often feature realistic looking humans in abstract and bizarre environments. The environments resemble a combination of futuristic and old fashioned aesthetics.^[4] Tan's process was one that used real-life models to create a storyboard. He also shot pictures in his garage, using a video camera and empty boxes to create lighting.^[5] Shaun Tan has commented on the reason for this process: “I was very dependent on photography for a lot of the drawings, because they’re photo-realistic. It’s not my favorite style of working, and I didn’t feel very confident. The other thing was continuity. When I started, I was drawing everything out of my head by hand, and I was finding that there were accumulating continuity problems--just little things that you notice subconsciously, like the length of a sleeve, how a lapel falls, where the rim of a hat is. The only way to register all of that properly was to photograph a lot of the stuff"^[3] Shaun Tan has commented that he was influenced by The Snowman by Raymond Briggs.^[6]