The Arrival

There were multiple things I loved about The Arrival. I thought it was an effective and relevant use of the lack of dialogue considering that it was ultimately a story about a person that doesn’t have a voice. They come as a stranger to a place where they don’t know the language, and while he can communicate through basic symbolism he manages to make individual connections through basic human kindness.

I thought the symbolism was incredible. The sharp demonic shapes in his home town tells us so much about what that city is like without giving it any particular shape or time. It lets the reader imprint some of their own understanding and experience onto the story while also not showing us a particular place or time. The benefit of this lack of specificity makes the individual representative of the greater. He is not one immigrant in any one period, he, along with the others in the book serve to say that everyone has a story, that they are people and that even through the darkness and the hard choices there is a brightness to be found in life. The use of strange unknown shapes and fruit puts us in the shoes of the protagonist, the world he knows is recognizable to both him and to us but as he travels to a place the he doesn’t know we see a world that is alien.

The pages that showed a passing of time were (like the rest of the book) really well done. Not only visually beautiful but I thought they were a simple but incredibly effective way of portraying that. The amount of drawings that he did for some of these pages was not a necessity, we could have understood what was going on in less, but the impact of those pages was incredibly valuable to the experience of reading the comic.