Time in Shaun Tan's The Arrival

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a wordless graphic novel about being an immigrant and trying to start a new life in a foreign land. The style of the comic is set in sepia tones and in a photo realistic manner with bazar backgrounds. This blog will be briefly discussing the story in terms of McCould’s view of time in comics.

For the most part, the comic is told in a very moment-moment way. Each panel usually lead right up to the next one in motion and movement. As McCloud suggests, you can usually figure out how long a panel is supposed to last by its size. They can be small and thus show shorter passage of time over a greater length.

Or it can show a larger sense of time in a smaller length.

Along with the size of the panels, how they are broken up also tells us how we are to read time in relation to them. The first picture is very broken up to tell us quick each viewing of the clouds are while the second only have a slight gutter between panels to show a small time skip.

Both are used very well to let the reader know just how much time is passing between one image and the next. Even the style can let us know when in time we are in the novel.

The above picture has snapshot frames and has the appearance of older and decaying pictures. This lets us know that the events shown here happened a longer time ago compared to the brighter images that we see through the rest of the book. While there seems to be greater leaps in time between panels here than in the rest of the book there is still a moment-moment feeling going on. With the size of the photos being generally the same and being about the same distance from each other, we can easily gather that at least in this woman’s mind these events did happen one after another. It all helps the reader to make sense of this confusing situation by allowing them to move through them quickly and to help better understand what is happening to the main character.