Week 01: Wordless Comics

This week, I got visual pleasure by reading Shaun Tan's “The Arrival”. Unlike comics, which are written or shown in conversation, these works proceed through sequential images of pictures.
This kind of graphics is called wordless “Graphic Novel”. When we look at the title "The Arrival", we can guess that the story of this work has arrived somewhere away from somewhere. And in reality, this work proceeds through the frame of each episode arriving somewhere.

This work shows the speaker who lives the life of immigrants in the imaginary world with beautiful illustrations. In the early days, scenes seemed to be almost realistic life, but as the screen progressed, it showed that it was a work with a lot of fictional imagination images through delicate description screen composition.

The scenes show similar forms of scenes such as dramas, movies, and animations.
On page 47, the speaker uses a technique that makes the image blurred as he gets his mind to the point of view. The 90-91 page shows the whole scene and then describes the situation in the space in detail. And when you look at 114-115 pages, each character is shown as a close up by one frame, and the scene that becomes a zoom out on the screen where the two characters meet is expressed. Through the scenes where each image is connected, the story is naturally progressed in the head.

"The Arrival" has a picture body consisting of delicate descriptions of black and white pencils. The black and white paintings make the immigrants feel more unfamiliar when they come to a new space and give them a feeling of seeing old pictures so that they feel like recalling the past while watching a single photo album. It was a work that could grasp the contents more clearly than well-written writing. People who like to be composed of novels and other articles rather than comics or graphic novels with a lot of images usually prefer the former because it seems to give the limit of imagination. However, "The Arrival" is a work that can break down such opinions. The situation is seen one by one, but the possibility of interpreting what kind of dialogue is infinite.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 08: Stereotype and the ethics of representation

This week I read "American Born Chinese" written by Gene Luen Yang. When I saw these stories at first, I thought that each of them had different contents because three stories were divided. The first story is related to the legend that The Monkey King is the main character. The second is a story about a first-generation immigrant boy named Jin Wang, who is related to school life, and the third is about a Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee, who visited a white boy's school called Danny, the main character. But if you read these stories to the end, you can see that these characters are all the same person. Their journey shows that it is the main content to find their identity. In the middle of the content, the main characters were able to indirectly see the stereotypes about Asians in the United States, but I thought that it was more empathic because I had experienced it in reality. I think that the story is a work that reflects reality because it contains all the ideas of the goo...
Read more

Week 09: A wide world of comics

As soon as I saw the word "Pyongyang" in the list of books to read this week, I started to read this book with a familiar feeling. I am a South Korean, so the word Pyongyang is very familiar, but it is a divided country between South and North Korea, so the South Korean nationality does not have the authority to visit North Korea. So I started to read this book with the idea that I could see the presence of the place where the same culture and history of the past were. "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea" is a book written by Guy Delisle. Delisle is a Canadian Quebec writer who wrote a book about his two months at a French animation company in Pyongyang, "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea". North Korea has all the bureaucracy of totalitarian closure, which contains his experience of expressing the difficulties he has experienced in his life in Pyongyang. The overall picture has a monotonous tone, so it was very suitable to express a closed atmospher...
Read more