Shaun Tan, “The Arrival”, Book Illustrations

“The Arrival” by Shaun Tan is a wordless graphic novel published by Hodder 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,

Shaun Tan portrays the experience of a father emigrating to a new land. 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.