A wordless tale of belonging: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Looking over much of my previous work as an illustrator and writer, such as The Rabbits (about colonisation), The Lost Thing (about a creature lost in a strange city) or The Red Tree (a girl wandering through shifting dreamscapes), I realise that I have a recurring interest in notions of ‘belonging’, particularly the finding or losing of it. (Shaun Tan, in an article written for Viewpoint magazine)

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a beautiful, immersive example of the internationally renowned illustrator’s narratives of belonging. There are no words in this book – just gorgeously rendered photorealist drawings that tell a migrant’s story in an unprecedented way.

The first images of the book usher you into a family’s life: a clock on a mantelpiece, a child’s drawing, a cracked teapot, a portrait of three people smiling. A father, a mother and a young daughter hold hands as they travel through streets heavy with the shadows of monsters; the man steps onto a train, headed for a new country. The Arrival looks like a photo album, but it is also a narrative, exploring a unique story with so much care that it can be universally understood.

Without language, we all find ourselves in a strange land. In The Arrival, there is little that is familiar to anchor us. Tan’s traveller arrives in a city that is half Ellis Island, half Oz: the writing that appears on signs and paperwork is elaborate and undecipherable; people are accompanied by alien creatures perching in baskets or on shoulders. It is unlike any place we have ever dreamed of, yet this man must now try to make it his home.

Slowly, he puzzles out the basics. How can he find work? He is fired from one job, and frightened from another, because he cannot read. What does food look like here? His crude sketch of a bread loaf elicits instead a curly gourd and a crustacean-like plant, but also an invitation to dinner from a man who, it turns out, also came from a dangerous homeland.

Tan’s illustrations resonate with empathy, rendering the many tragic stories here as keenly as he does the joyful ones. In The Arrival, his signature ability to make the strange tender has found another perfect story to tell.

Melbourne Writers Festival is delighted to present Shaun Tan’s The Arrival as a keynote event. Tan’s inventive graphic stories have already migrated from page to screen, with the Oscar-winning film The Lost Thing. Now, The Arrival has been brought to life in music by Sydney composer and musician Ben Walsh. An amazing live ‘sonic-scape’, performed by the multi-instrumental Orkestra of the Underground, accompanies projections of Tan’s exquisite illustrations. Tan will introduce this performance via video.

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is at 7:30pm on 26 August at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Tan also appears in conversation with Mike Shuttleworth on 3 September.

A Week of Writing with Pictures: Bernard Caleo’s MWF diary

Bernard Caleo has been making – writing, drawing and publishing – comics since 1990. He collaborates on comics with friends, creates solo books and – since 1997 – has compiled, edited and published the giant Australian romance comics anthology Tango via his own imprint, Cardigan Comics. He also runs comic classes and workshops. You can visit his website at www.cardigancomics.com. Bernard shared his MWF itinerary with MWFblog.

So, okay, I’m pretty much always reading comics or making comics or talking about comics or thinking about comics (that is, when I’m not making theatre for museums), but this week is HUGE!

On Wednesday and Thursday I will be sharing MWF stages with other fine makers of comics, as part of the Schools Program.

From 12.30 to 1.15pm, Pat Grant and I will be discussing the topic of ‘Seeing the World Differently‘ in an illustrated talk.  Pat is one of the most dedicated cartoonists I know, both in the time he spends at the drawing board but also in his thinking about comics: comics theory, I guess.  It’s no surprise that he is doing postgraduate study through Macquarie University and that a long comic book (‘graphic novel’, if you’re a fan of the term) will be the outcome, with a thesis examining the process of making the book submitted alongside.  Go, Pat!

We’ll be talking about the way that the mode of drawing things in a comic – the simplifications involved – can amplify meaning. Also the way that the sequencing of pictures (we call them ‘panels’) in a comic builds a world in a different way to a single complex picture.

We’ll be talking about the difference between drawing:

And comics:

(two versions of me by me)

These are interesting questions for cartoonists but also for people who read comics: just how do these things WORK? So, a bit of comics theory for kids…

On Thursday 2 September at 11:15am, I will be discussing The Alternative Hamlet with Nicki Greenberg. Nicki’s graphic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2006, Allen and Unwin) was a knockout, and her version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (published this year) – as the cover says, ‘staged on the page’ – will literally knock you out if it is hurled at you. 420 pages! Massive! And she has created incredible worlds on those pages, both of the action of the play and of the inky actors who play the parts. It is the connection between these two worlds which I particularly look forward to discussing with her.

From the great speech. Words by William Shakespeare, pictures/comics adaptation by Nicki Greenberg © 2010

I’m striking out on my own with an MWF presentation called Picture This!‘ at ArtPlay from 12.30 to 1.15pm.  In this one I’ll be show-and-telling about the different forms of comics – comic strip, comic book, graphic novel. These formalities out of the way, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make a large comic strip together, with me drawing up the front on a big piece of paper. My experience with these things is that they usually end up being about death or poo, sometimes both, so I’m looking forward to that.

Later that very night it’s off to the launch of Going Down Swinging #30. This is of interest because GDS has been incorporating comics into its lit lineup for many a year, and good on them for that, and this issue features the ‘graphic novella’ (I like the humility of that term, whereas ‘graphic novel’ seems a bit jumped-up and fancy-pants, don’t you think?), Itinerant Fighting Monk by Michael Camilleri. Now yes, Michael is a very close friend, but that does not influence me in the slightest when I say that this story/comic/illustrated fictional blasphemous autobiographical tale is the greatest statement on fatherhood and subjectivity that I have ever seen.

On the Saturday afternoon for MWF, I will be launching a long comic book by Gregory Mackay, Francis Bear, which is also being published in French this year by, well, by a French comics publisher, The Hootchie Kootchie.  Fear not however, my monolingual friends: the version I am launching is in English. And pictures. The venue is Feddish, in Federation Square, launch time is 2.30pm, with me doing a bit of a hoo-hah around 3pm. Come and pick up this book, ‘an intriguing study of an inventive drunken bear’s pathway to oblivion’. Gregory has been drawing the misadventures of Francis for many a year, and doing some fine work with comic book rhythms along the way – I can’t wait to see Francis tackle oblivion. It will no doubt be hilarious.

From there I will go to work (I’m a projectionist) on Saturday night – and, you know, relax.

What a week: comics, comics and comics – pretty darn fine.