However, although Tan’s peculiar drawing style has been widely praised, little has been written on Tan’s graphic choices as a medium-specific means to tell a story. Tan’s narrative use of the visual features of comics is what makes The Arrival an exemplary work of purely graphic storytelling. Since wordless graphic novels necessarily ‘flout comics’ central element of word-image relation’, as Florian Groß reminds us ( 2013: 197), they need to rely heavily on the visual narrative means available in comics.
![literature character type grid literature character type grid](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/81/6f/22816faf006a3dc026f797167d71ca80.jpg)
At the end of the book, though, the protagonist is finally able to reunite with his family in the new country, where his little daughter seems to be adapting way faster than he did. Tan, whose father was himself a Chinese/Malaysian immigrant, tells the story of an everyman who is forced by an obscure, oppressive power to leave his family and relocate to a strange new land, with all the problems that migration and resettling bring about. This is a remarkable achievement if one considers that Tan’s visual style has been described as ‘decidedly antinaturalistic’ ( Groß 2013: 205) and that he creates a vaguely steampunk world crammed with strange pets, unintelligible languages, and weird objects, whose behavior appears as much unpredictable to the protagonist as to the book’s viewers. canon primarily includes woodcut novelists-such as Lynd Yard and Giacomo Patri-the genre has been successfully incorporated into the comics medium in the last few decades thanks to visionary artists like Eric Drooker ( Flood!: A Novel in Pictures, 1992) and Peter Kuper ( The System, 1997).Īmong the contemporary wordless graphic novels in the medium of comics, Australian artist and award-winning filmmaker Shaun Tan’s 2006 work The Arrival stands out as direct and easily readable. Distant ancestors of this niche genre can be found in the works of German painter Otto Nückel and Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel, whose 1919 woodcut novel A Passionate Journey was a commercial success in Europe.
![literature character type grid literature character type grid](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/91/79/14/9179143a1ad3295b1e55607e3fd77cfe.png)
This essay focuses on a work that belongs to a subset of graphic novels, namely wordless graphic novels.