Skip to main content

The Arrival by Shaun Tan (3 Points)

This beautiful piece captures the uncertainty of those who've experienced immigration face, while not being entirely negative. It shows the humanity others are capable of giving despite there being a language barrier. It gives hope to those who are going into personally uncharted territory that there will always be kindess.

We follow a man leaving behind his wife and child to move to a foreign place in hopes of a better future for his family. Along the way we meet some characters that help our main hero through his transition into a foreign land. In the end, his family is finally reunited with him and they are able to be together in this new place.

What I loved about this piece is that it was abstracting a very real subject. Even in the beginning of the book where the dedications go, it says "for my parents." You can tell just from the drawings that there was a lot of love put into this piece. It was personal, but abstracted enough so that anyone could understand and apply the underlying analogy to themselves. It was incredible to see this alien world littered with cute creatures that rival Earth's own birds, cats, and dogs. A world with almost science-fantasy scenery. Not only was the scenery different, but the way people went about their days was also fantastical. Our main character arrived in a elevator that came from the sky. That's so cool?? 

I think it's the interactions between the characters though that make this such a beautiful story. Each person our protagonist meets has their own story to tell. Through the abstraction Tan uses, we can tell that the giants overrunning and burning one of the side character's countries is perhaps alluding to tyranny of the government they were facing in real life. But even after these characters share their backstories, they're always willing to help out our protagonist. This world is rich with love that humanity has stored in each in every one of us, and it's gorgeous.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Point Total (93)

FINAL total - 93 points Midterm total   __________________________     - 40 points My Friend Dahmer                                                    - 5 points     Class                                                                     - 1 point     Angel's Hill                                                          - 5 points     Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun                                  - 6 points ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suicide Boy (6)

This one was something. I saw the title of it and said, "Alright what the hell is this." I don't know how I feel about this comic! I liked it, but also I felt weird reading it because it was subtly horny and you could TELL. Which is very confusing especially since it's supposed to be talking about serious stuff like self-harm and depression. Like I would be reading it and enjoying it's strange dark humor, but then there would be random really suggestive stuff happening to the main character who is a suicidal TEENAGER and I would feel super gross. Somehow I read the entire thing through to it's up-to-date issue, because I really wanted the main character to get better and you know, have character development with the friends he made, but there's something off here. I literally just googled the title and suggestive pictures of the main character came up, I don't know how I avoided this until right now since whatever I saw was much less obvious, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Understanding Comics (3 Points)

 In sophomore year, we had to read parts of this book so we could understand how to storyboard/make animatics better. I'm excited to be able to read the entirety now, as it was amazingly helpful before! Not sure if counts, but here is the comic project I made sophomore year using parts of the book as reference on how to create each shot. It was made with an ink brush and took ~5 days to complete (and so much ink). It was on poster paper, so it was ~30 x 20 inches as well. What I loved about this book, is that it teaches you things about comics you never think about unless you plan on creating them. Things I understood without knowing the context behind them, finally started to make sense after reading Scott's witty, easily digestible explanation of why comics are structured like how they are.  I think a great topical take-away was his description of word/picture combinations. We talked about wordless comics last week, but knowing when to use words to control the reader's fo...
Post a Comment
Read more