THE ARRIVAL

Comic books like Shaun Tan's The Arrival do not need words to tell their story. In fact a good comic book should be able to tell the story through the pictures alone, the reader must be able to clearly tell what is happening in each panel regardless of the words attached to them. The Arrival uses vivid and detailed pictures to describe an action or an event. Much like storyboards that blueprint scenes in a movie. Although some storyboards do have dialogue at the bottom the point of them is to see if the visuals will go along with the dialogue, or more importantly to see if the images themselves can tell the story on their own without the help of the dialogue. The thing that makes comics different from normal reading material is in fact the use of pictures, therefore the pictures themselves must tell the story just as well as the dialogue can. In a lot of Tan's stories the images are drawn in such a way so the reader knows exactly what is happening without the use of dialogue. For example, one section of his comic depicts an elevator floating to the ground, and then a man stepping out of that elevator as the wings attached to it disappear and the man walks away. Its more than easy enough to tell what is happening without the writer telling us. The point of words and books is to tell a story, to describe events and situations in detail so that we may imagine them in our heads. The only thing Tan is doing is making it easier and simply giving you the image that you most likely would have seen in your head. Even though what everyone reads might be interpreted differently the general idea and premise of the situation is the same. Basically the premise of Tan's book is just the opposite of other books or novels, instead of giving us words to help create images in our mind he gave us pictures to help us create words like when i just described the section of the comic book using my own words.