Comics Worth Reading: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

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by Jonny Jimison

Note: The latest volume in The Dragon Lord Saga, “Dragons and Desperados,” releases March 31, 2025. You can preorder your copy today from Rabbit Room Press.

Everyone should read The Arrival at least once. It looks like a lushly-illustrated picture book, it reads like a graphic novel, and there are no words, only pictures. Granted, no words means that there’s no telling what the protagonist’s name is, so I’ll simply refer to him as “the man.”

The Arrival begins with the man reluctantly leaving his wife and his little girl to seek a new future for them in a faraway country. While searching for work and food in a bewildering and unfamiliar setting, he slowly makes his way with the help of strangers who take a moment to help him understand a new setting, a new food, or a new job. Each one of these strangers has their own story of their own arrival, and each time they lend a hand, they move the man forward on his journey toward belonging in his new home.

The man has to work hard to understand his new surroundings, much less find a home in them. Similarly, The Arrival invites you to engage personally, to search a little deeper to understand. This is not a journey that you read—it’s a journey that you experience.

One of the biggest ways that author Shaun Tan achieves this is by abstracting the entire story. There’s no dialogue, so you have to imagine what the characters are saying based on context clues and body language. The written language on signs is a made-up series of glyphs, so you have to make your best guess, even as the man does the same. The language of this land is foreign to the man, so it’s foreign to the reader as well.

This ambiguity extends beyond language, though—the architecture, the animals, the customs, everything in this land is weird and different. It’s deliberately and delightfully surreal, with just enough context to say “I think I might have some idea of what that thing is, but …”

Despite all that has been abstracted, it’s the super-specific details that tell the story. For example:

At the beginning of the story, as he prepares to leave his family, the man carefully wraps and packs a family photograph. Then he makes a little origami bird as a parting gift for his daughter. That origami bird becomes part of the language of the book, representing the man’s connection to his daughter and one of the few methods he has of communicating in a strange land. And the family photograph almost becomes like a character itself—we return to that framed photo over and over again, just like the man returns to it, homesick and lonely and clinging to his purpose: a better future for his family.

Tan is an artist with a lot to say, and he uses every trick in the book to say it without words. But my favorite trick of all is how he zooms in and out.

Close up of the family photograph. Zoom out. The man is looking at the photo as he sits in his ship cabin. Zoom out. We’re outside the ship, seeing him through his porthole. Zoom out. His porthole is one of dozens, all housing a similar story. Turn the page—and we’ve zoomed out again. The ship is one small ship on a huge sea in a big world.

The same thing happens again when the man moves into his apartment in the new land. This time, instead of the outside of a ship, we zoom out to the outside of a building, where his window is one of dozens, and there’s just enough detail that we can make out which window is his. But as we continue to zoom out, his window becomes harder to spot.

Then we flip the page to a wide shot of the whole city, and … who knows which building is his, much less which window?

Tan uses this device over and over, sometimes zooming out, sometimes zooming in. The message is clear: Zoom into just one life, and you’ll find a story of depth and detail. Zoom out to thousands of lives, and you have a land teeming with thousands of untold stories.

How can one man belong in such a huge, immersive, disorienting environment?

By zooming in. Which is what some of the other characters choose to do.

Again and again, the man is assisted in his journey by strangers who choose to pause and give him directions, or show him the ropes of a new job, or introduce him to friends. Each time, the stranger begins as a face in the crowd, but then we start to see more—their face, their posture, their attitude. Despite the lack of language, we get to know them as the man gets to know them.

Then something incredible happens: We get a handful of pages sharing the story of their arrival, each one a harrowing, unsettling story of the circumstances that led them to this wild, intimidating immigration experience.

These mini-stories are incredibly powerful for a couple of reasons. For one, when the flashback ends, we return to the present day. Here is the person who lived that difficult story, and they have survived. Some are thriving and some aren’t, but all of them show evidence of having made this new land their home. This is where they work, rest, and play, where they share meals with loved ones and play games with friends. The man is living the hardest days now, but there is hope.

The flashbacks are also powerful for us, the reader. After pages of working to understand this strange land and living the man’s confusing journey in it, there’s something cathartic about getting a real, concrete story about this new stranger, almost as if the story is reaching back out to us in return. Yes, the flashbacks are surreal, silent, and often heartbreaking … but here, where there was once a sea of strangers, is real human connection. We finally started to understand something, and it was the most important thing: another human life.

That is the hopeful message of The Arrival. In the author’s own words:

One of the great powers of storytelling is that it invites us to walk in other people’s shoes for a while, but perhaps even more importantly, it invites us to contemplate our own shoes also. We might do well to think of ourselves as possible strangers in our own strange land. What conclusions we draw from this are unlikely to be easily summarized, all the more reason to think further on the connections between people and places, and what we might mean when we talk about ‘belonging.’

Oh, and I’ll risk a spoiler here: The man reunites with his wife and child by the end of the book. This migrant story has a happy ending.

May it always be so.

Want to explore a little deeper?

• The quote from Shaun Tan is taken from an article on his website. Read the entire article—it’s well worth it.

• Now that we’ve explored the themes and ideas of The Arrival, read my accompanying post that explores the artwork in more depth.

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Jonny Jimison is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator. In addition to his graphic novel series The Dragon Lord Saga, he is the illustrator of When Going on a Dragon Hunt for Bandersnatch Books and creator of the webcomic Rabbit Trails for the Rabbit Room.

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Photo from The Arrival by Shaun Tan