The Arrival

For most comics today dialogue is a major component of the storytelling, each characters voice developing the story further every time they speak. However, Shaun Tan's The Arrival ignores that aspect of storytelling when he made this story completely wordless. That is not to say there wasn't a language in this world he created, there was but it was foreign to both the reader and the main character and only written on signs. This proved to be a key aspect of this world that our Protagonist moved too, as well as making the reader rely on many other content clues such as body language and the color pallets. In a story about immigration and new chances for life, this is such a surreal experience, the layout and design of this comic firmly placing you in the shoes of people who have walked this path. It's able to do this by showing just how crazy and outlandish this new land was from the beginning land that was calm and normal to us. It threw us out of our element with glee and watched as we struggled to understand at first, our new world slowly molding us until we were still ourselves, but at the sometime someone who understood the wonderful place we had found. By tapping into shared human experiences of seeing someplace new it multiplies that aspect, therefore allowing us to settle into a mindset of understanding.