The Arrival

This may be a tad bias consisting that I enjoy wordless storytelling especially in comic form. The Arrival does a fantastic job at telling a deep and full story with any words.  The Arrival has a specific format that goes from many small square panels on a page to large full spare illustration. The square panels usually don’t feature much. Often times the action in limited from panel to panel. Sometimes it can just be small intimate things like hand gestures or a short conversation. This gets us as the reader up close and personal with our main character as they immigrate and learn to live in a strange new place. The small illustrations give a close look at his life, mannerism and day-to-day life.  Now the beautiful large sweeping spares depicting the cityscape do an amazing job showing us what this strange and new world is like. The drawings are extremely well done with a lot of details and atmosphere. The fantasy city our main character travels to is almost like a dream, everything is big and new and other worldly.  In fact they can be a little overwhelming at times.  The fantasy like quality to the city the man moves to help us feel as blown away and unfamiliar as the man, just as he is taking in and learning about all the new things around this world, so are we.  This works so much better then setting it in a somewhere readers would recognize things that we know. In this would everything to us is just as new as it is from the man. The format does a great job at letting us feel as the character is feeling, from small moments with other people to big overwhelming feelings of wonder and loneliness.   All the clear images, the passage of times, the big shots of the city create a beautiful story all without the need of a single word.