Sunday, October 15, 2017

The Arrival

The Arrival is a very peculiar comic in that it doesn't use dialogue or any recognizable words throughout the entire book. Every bit of information that has been relayed had done so visually. We know how a character is feeling by observing their facial expression and body gestures. We see close ups of their actions to indicate what they are doing. There's flashbacks to show the story of other immigrant's story and how they got to the same destination as the protagonist. Whenever there is a mood shift the temperature of the black and white pages changes.
An example of it happening was when the protagonist was working a factory and meet an old man who recounted his time in the army, in the beginning it was a warm sepia tone as the crowd of towns folk cheers for the troops but it soon transform into a much more cooler gray as the solider marches on and the and then it became a more murky blue-gray color when the end of the war drew near.
 Considering that The Arrival is about the immigrant experience it's fitting that the comic would not have dialogue, it forces the viewer to adopt the same point of view as the characters, almost all of them were immigrants coming into a new world and experiencing culture shock, language barriers, and loneliness. Since many of them do not know what anybody is saying or read anything they rely on what they're seeing.

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