Shaun Tan’s The Arrival was published in 2006. A “silent graphic novel”, it is comprised entirely of Tan’s illustrations, with no text. Much of the text is elliptical, symbolic or elusive: a man embarks upon a journey to a strange and unknown land, leaving his wife and daughter behind. The city he finds himself in is strange, unusual, with bizarre customs, buildings, animals and food. He tries to make friends, find work, carve out a life for himself and understand this new place. In short, he stands as a symbol for all those displaced migrant people who move to make a new life for themselves in distant, anonymous countries. As the man meets people he hears their stories, and learns of those fleeing persecution and tyranny, those debilitated and bruised by war, those lonely and unsure.
It is difficult to convey the beauty and power of Tan’s art, each drawing rendered in sepia and faded like a series of old photographs. Although the specifics of the events in the book are left vague and the language of the new city deliberately anonymous and unreal, the dress and comportment of the characters suggests the 1920s, and the art has that feel. Some drawings fill whole double-pages, while other pages are made up of dozens of small pictures. Tan draws the sadness on a young girl’s face, or the intimidating machinery of capitalist landscape, with equal ability and emotion. The lack of speech or text in the book reinforces the silence of migrants, their lack of voice in the countries they inhabit. It is a sad book, sad yet beautiful, and one of the most striking and remarkable books I’ve read for some time.
Funny Misshapen Body (2009) is the latest instalment of comic book artist Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical graphic novels (although the term “graphic novel” somehow seems not to apply in this case), following previous works such as Clumsy and Unlikely. The book takes us through Brown’s uncomfortable adolescence at high school and art college, through his travails with the opposite sex, his internal struggles with art, his dalliances with drink and drugs, and more. Brown’s trademark sketchy and bare style reflects the universality of his subject, and many readers (perhaps particularly male readers) will be able to identify with various of his experiences (hopeless crushes on unattainable girls, the awkward first kisses, worrying about being fat or ugly and unable to get dates, etc). His drawing style also lends an almost nostalgic, childhood feel to the book; the most interesting sections are those which undercut this feeling, most notably the chapter dealing with Brown’s teenage diagnosis with Crohn’s Disease.
