Narrative structure in wordless comics

Abstract

Applies the terminology and the methodologies laid out in the book Narrative structure in comics (POSTEMA, 2018a) to the graphic novel The arrival, by Shaun Tan (2006), considered as a wordless comics. Defends that abstraction and simplification are hard to find in Tan’s chosen style and that much of the meaning that his images accrue comes from the visual style he uses, which resembles old photographs. Due to the snapshot / photographic quality of Tan’s images, most panels, like photographs, seem to represent just an instant, only capturing the sense of time passing across several panels. The arrival does not employ any grids, as it is laid out with generous, clear gutters, so the format of closely adjacent panels without any blank space between them, and neither uses insets, but only several implied insets of frames within frames. The article also uses two comic stories by Fabio Moon to illustrate the concept of sequences.