Week 1: Wordless Comics

How can wordless comics like The Arrival tell complex stories without using words?

In The Arrival Shaun Tan tells a complex story without using words by employing a variety of visual devices. These devices hold the reader's hand during the more complicated parts of the story, and tell him that everything is going to be okay. Near the beginning of the story, a simple sequence of zooming panels focusing in on a picture of a character's younger self avoids an overt notation of a change in time and successfully initiates a flashback. A similar flashback occurs later with the juxtaposition of two panels, each of which shows a man holding the exact same pose, but the men differ greatly in age. This juxtaposition effectively links the two as the same person in the reader's mind. The similarity of the character's clothes within the flashback to those worn in the present reinforces that idea, as does the repetition of the technique to exit the sequence.
Other plot elements such as long passages of time and feelings of monotony are created by the repetition of identically sized panels. A beautiful example of this is right after the character proceeds to send money he got from work back to the family, where a plant of some sort is shown to transform and change with the seasons over a two page spread. That section, along with the consequent changes that might occur over such a time, such as the birth of children for the flying creature outside the main character's window, reinforce the idea that the plant wasn't just going through the transformation over the period of a single day.
Alongside these techniques, the limited conversations between characters are handled mainly through gesture or, as in one instance, by the act of drawing the message. The story, being one about immigration, lends itself to having little character to character conversation. The lack of understandable written words both for the character and the reader groups the two together. This immerses the reader into having a shared experience with the character.
I was fully immersed in the story and, to me, the synergy of the message of the story with the approach of telling it is what struck me the most. It's very well orchestrated. It's done so well that while searching for some semblance of meaning within that strange world, I, just like the character, slowly began to get used to it.