Thoughts on The Arrival

The Arrival was a pleasant read and stood out against various other graphic novels, one main reason being that it was completely wordless. Rather than make the storyline confusing, however, the lack of words actually enhanced the novel’s narrative. The Arrival was well-paced, rich in both cast and background, and open to various interpretations.  Another nice perk about wordless comics is that there is no language barrier to block anyone from reading it. Just about anyone in the world can understand what is going on precisely because there are no words to dictate the actions in the book.

One thing that particularly stood out about The Arrival was that many of the pictures blended in together so seamlessly it was almost like looking at a film reel, or at a storyboard. One page in particular was dedicated solely to a man throwing bottles into a pipe, and another focused on the motions of hands tying a parcel. Sequences as such greatly added to the storytelling and contrasted nicely against the larger pictures that took up entire pages. In most graphic novels, such detail and the intricacy required to draw out every single action would be deemed unnecessary because the dialogue tends to fill the readers in. Without any text, the readers were able to come up with their own interpretations of different scenes.

Another enjoyable aspect of the book was the larger pictures in the book which served as juxtaposition against the small, detailed scene-by-scene drawings. The monsters in the book were also a nice touch and served as physical representations of the family’s feelings upon moving to a new location. In several pages, the monsters were portrayed as leviathans looming over the city, symbolizing their fear and anxiety in a new place. On the other hand, the little cartoonish monster that accompanied the father around seemed to symbolize hope and companionship, especially when it develops a friendship with another family’s monster. These metaphorical monsters were a good way of filling in what words would; they served as visual guides to the feelings of the family in lieu of actual words.

The Arrival is truly a good example of what a wordless comic should be like. The lack of words allowed the graphic novel to be abstract in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had there been words narrating what was going on throughout.