Australian Edge is relatively new blog devoted to showcasing Australian creativity, and it has an interview with Shaun Tan. His graphic novel The Arrival is hovering near the top of my wishlist. New York Magazine has an excerpt (that’s where this picture is from). The story is entirely wordless — the only words are in an invented alphabet — and describes an immigrant to a fantastical alternative New York. NY Times writes that “his biggest flaw is making his pictures too pretty”. Another reviewer thinks it’s too hopeful and kind-hearted and naïve, but let me tell you, I can get enough cynicism from the news any day.
Tan writes about his work on the book on his website:
Being a half-Chinese at a time a place when this was fairly unusual may have compounded [my troubled connection to a ‘homeland’], as I was constantly being asked ‘where are you from?’ to which my response of ‘here’ only prompted a deeper inquiry, ‘where do your parents come from?’ At least this was far more positive attention than the occasional low-level racism I experienced as a child, and which I also noticed directed either overtly or surreptitiously at my Chinese father from time to time. Growing up I did have a vague sense of separateness, an unclear notion of identity or detachment from roots, on top of that traditionally contested concept of what it is to be ‘Australian’, or worse, ‘un-Australian’ (whatever that might mean).
Beyond any personal issues, though, I think that the ‘problem’ of belonging is perhaps more of a basic existential question that everybody deals with from time to time, if not on a regular basis. It especially rises to the surface when things ‘go wrong’ with our usual lives, when something challenges our comfortable reality or defies our expectations – which is typically the moment when a good story begins, so good fuel for fiction.
And the process:
The actual process of then producing the final images came to be more like film-making than conventional illustration. Realising the importance of consistency over multiple panels, coupled with a stylistic interest in early photographs, I physically constructed some basic ‘sets’ using bits of wood and fridge-box cardboard, furniture and household objects. These became simple models for drawn structures in the book, anything from towering buildings to breakfast tables. With the right lighting, and some helpful friends acting out the roles of characters plotted in rough drawings, I was able to video or photograph compositions and sequences of action that seemed to approximate each scene. Selecting still images, I played with these by digitally, distorting, adding and subtracting, drawing over the top of them, and testing various sequences to see how they could be ‘read’. These became the compositional references for finished drawings that were produced by a more old-fashioned method – graphite pencil on cartridge paper. For each page of up to twelve images, the whole process took about a week… not including any rejects, of which there were several.
Wow, I really want this.
