The Arrival

The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel written by Shaun Tan and published by Hodder Children's Books in 2006. The book is a silent comic and contains no dialogue or text throughout the whole book. It spans 128 pages and is organized into six chapters. The work employs panels of varying sizes, including many full-page illustrations. The story focuses on an immigrant's life in an imaginary world, portraying the experience of a father emigrating to a new land. Shaun Tan differentiates The Arrival from children's picture books, citing an emphasis on continuity in texts with multiple frames and panels, and that a graphic novel text like his more closely resembles a film making process. He has additionally described his desire to build a kind of empathy in readers: "In Australia, people don't stop to imagine what it's like for some of these refugees. They just see them as a problem once they're here, without thinking about the bigger picture. I don't expect the book to change anybody's opinion about things, but if it at least makes them pause to think, I'll feel as if I've succeeded in something."