(1) The Arrival 도착

The Arrival, written by Shaun Tan, was a new genre of comic that I have never experienced before. The very first thing that caught my attention is Shaun Tan’s incredible art style. Each and every frame is like a well-rendered illustration, and its continuity made it seems like a sequence of movie frames. When I first saw the character illustration, I was impressed by its realistically rendered figures. However, the wide shot of the environment was more towards surrealism. It was an interesting combination of realistic art and stylized art. Shaun Tan’s imagination of the fantasy world was just incredible. The unique shape designs melted into small creatures and gigantic buildings created an interesting atmosphere. I was able to seek some Steam-Punk features (factories with smokes, zeppelins, Helmet of Giant soldiers) mixed with a Dreamy fantasy world (Flying fairy creatures, Little Creature living with main character, Geometric shape language in building designs). Shaun Tan’s Art and creativity was definitely my favorite part of this book.

It was very interesting that the main theme of this Surrealistic art book is base on ‘immigration’. The purpose of immigration is moving to a different country to get a job to support family, which is considered to be a fanciless real-life situation that has nothing to do with imagination. However, Shaun Tan was able to recreate the fear and expectation on the foreign country into a surrealistic fantasy world. This concept made me wonder if people back in old days could have imagine their immigration as a great journey to a fantasy world. I was happy to see many racial variations appear in this book. Shaun Tan successfully catches the characteristics of different races from different cultures. As the main character interacts with people from different cultural background, they share their own story of how they ended up being in this country. Through the main character’s interaction with new environment and new people, Shaun Tan not only talks about the experience of immigration, but also talks about breaking the racial and cultural barriers.  The portraits of people included in the front and back of this book seems to tell the audience that this book is about everyone that has to live in different country for jobs. I really loved that part.