The Arrival

The Arrival is a graphic narrative that is told without dialogue or captions. We read the story through a series of juxtaposed images. These range from tiny cubes that fill up a page to giant double page spreads with sweeping vistas of jarring settings.
Boiled down to the essence, the story is an allegory to immigration. A loving family lives in an inhospitable place. The father has to leave them in pursuit of a better life.

The family and their original home has a similar visual language to what we are used to. Their home is a modest city dwelling with teacups and table clocks sitting about. Father wears a suit and a bowler hat. This serves as a basis for the immense contrast that's about to come.

The visual language of the new city is vastly different and completely new to us, however it remains consistent and logical. Cones and spherical shapes dominate rather than square. There are sculptures bigger than buildings, and bird/bugs that fly in swarms above. It's fantastic and exciting.

Instead of just being inviting to look around in awe, we are transported into the confusing bureaucracy of immigration with the main character. He has to interact when he doesn't know the customs or language, find a bed and food when he doesn't even know the name for them. This struggle is emphasized by the foreign language of symbols that is plastered around the city. We recognize it as a language but have no idea what it means.

Through his trials, the main character meets other immigrants and finds solace in their company. We see their stories as flashbacks nested inside the main narrative. Getting to know so much pain is heartbreaking, but it's that much more cathartic when we see the new city as an escape from past horrors. The main characters family arrives at the end in a joyous reunion. In a symbol of empathy, we see the daughter assist a newcomer. Each journey will have their troubles, but the cycle of good will goes on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Graphic Narrative

I read the Will Eisner novel Dropsie Avenue. One of the fist things that struck me was that the art style seemed almost Baroque. Steep contrast using lots of absolute black to convey drama. Tense compositions. The subject matter of the first scene could be baroque or biblical, hatred of another clan causes a man to do an unspeakable horror, leaving two graves under the same family tree. The subject matter that takes up the majority of the novel isn't exactly what you would expect from a classical painting or a pulp comic book. It details the squabbles and relationships of a neighborhood. Not exactly the mundane details of their lives, but the events and arguments that define them. It was fascinating to me how he didn't need to stick with the same characters to have a consistent story. A vignette would focus on one family and after the conclusion of their main drama we would hear characters a generation later lightly gossiping about their great horrors that befell them. I reme...
Read more

The Killing Joke

What is your reaction to the text? This dark manifestation of the Batman and Joker dynamic was one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. It was not afraid to get violent, but seemed to value psychological terror over gore. This is best emphasized in the creepy train ride commissioner Gordon was forced to take. The maniacal depictions of the Joker coupled with his nihilistic musings are a combination to fear. I've never see a Joker origin story before, so I reacted strongly to it. He mentions he "remembers it one way, sometimes another," so I think this is one of many possible origins and we shouldn't take it as absolute canon. I do believe he was a relatively normal person once, and something so terrible happened he had a psychotic break and decided to love his new self. What connections did you make with this story? Thematically this work was very familiar to me. I connected it with the tropes of the male hero, crazy villain, moral compass, and dams...
Read more

Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud's comic about comics not only taught me how comprehend graphic narratives, but media in general. Words and pictures in combination are such a part of our daily lives that we hardly ever take a second to analyze them. A lot of what I read seemed obvious as I read it. He dissected the basic building blocks of comprehension. How we create closure when part of the image isn't there.  We infer not only time but motion and action between panels. We see a raised axe with motion lines juxtaposed with a scream over a skyline, it's us who decapitated him. I'm currently reading Chew, a comic series about an FDA agent who can detect the entire history of every bite of food he eats. He uses this to solve crimes and often is forced to eat human flesh. Murderous sadists and cannibals abound, it can be kind of a gorey ride. The artist often uses this subject-to-subject transition technique to get around showing the super-violet details. In once scene, a raging canniba...
Read more