The Arrival - Wordless Comic

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is an excellent example of a wordless comic conveying a story without any (or only a little) confusion. These soft yet finely detailed drawings capture every emotion, action, and objects of certain attention to presume each situation in every panel. Faces can contort in many shapes to display surprise, hate, sorrow, happiness, and utter confusion. The body language, especially the gestures of the hands of every character, establish communication between one another. Added sways and wrinkles in clothing depict moving action. Not every object in the environment may be finely detailed, but each panel is never too busy - leaving the most important features more detailed than others. There are pinpointed breakdowns of complicated actions to fool-proof the reader, too, to not mistake what action that character is making. Even the slightly different shades of pencil or ink, ranging from a red to a raven-blue, add more tone or moods to the flashbacks of the people the main character meets up with.

To summarize, the story begins with a father packing up a suitcase. His wife and daughter run along with him, leaving an entire city filled with mysterious, but large, jagged-tailed monsters. They escape by a large boat to a strange new city of paradise, apparently where everyone flocks to as refugees from other distance cities. The man's wife and daughter must part from him and live in a separate quarter, until the father can find a stable place and a job to support them. He wonders the city confused to his whits about the weird creatures and symbols. Luckily, other refugees help him go on his way, to where he eventually ends up on a job at a factory. He's finally able to mail money back to his wife and daughter, so then eventually, they return to him and live in their new house in peace.

The story itself is interesting on how odd creatures, monsters, times of famine and war, inhabit their world (or separate worlds); every different refugee converges at some point or another to help each other along to live in their new odd world of paradise. But each refugee has a connection we can relate to or remember from our own history to look upon and feel sympathy for them. So while everything maybe super odd or weird, deep down there is a connection we understand to push the wordless comic more as story we are reading in our heads.