Author: John McBratney

It took me a second read-through of the arrival to realize that Shaun Tan actually ‘text’ throughout his novel. As our main character arrives in what we can presume to be New York City, we see that there is scripture written everywhere. It comes in the form of street signs, advertisement, maps, etc. What I find fascinating about this is that the scripture isn’t any ‘real’ language, but instead is suppose to put us in the main characters shoes by not giving us the privilege of being able to decipher text, just as the main character cannot. It also seems as if the text that Tan created in a mixture of all sorts of languages, furthering the narrative that NYC is a city of immigrants. I just find it a very cool, hidden feature of his novel. Although there is text in a ‘text-less’ book, the text cannot be deciphered and thus the book remains text-less to the reader.

During class this week, I couldn’t help but think of the significance of Ellis Island in a lot of our lives. Personally, my grandparents went through Ellis Island at a very young age. This book speaks to me in a way that helps me envision how my grandparents must have felt upon entering America. My grandfather was a linen trader in Ireland before entering the United States, reading through his memos, its clear his thoughts were very similar to the images displayed throughout this book. For me it is relatable because his memo’s are in fragments, almost as still images at points in his arrival, similar to the still images we see throughout the text. The images we see of New York City in the text reflect his memo’s as memorizing and grand, as he came from a rural background in Belfast, Ireland. Overall, I just find this text interesting because it helps me connect to my past, and I relate the text very closely to how I see my grandfather when he entered the United States for the first time as an immigrant.

I want to touch on something we briefly discussed today in class, Mazzucchelli’s use of color. In the first few pages, everything is mostly in the color blue. Later on in the book we realize that blue signifies Asterios’s past (specifically Asterios himself in the past). While he is watching his old video tapes, everything is blue suggesting he is watching the videos to lamenting his past. As soon as the lightening strikes, we are taken to purple and yellow, the colors that would signify Asterios’s present life. As we work our way through the book we see that Hana represents the color of red. Going through Asterios’s past, we see that there are moments in which Asterios and Hana are both red and blue, possibly meaning very close moments the two of them shared. When their colors contrasted greatly, they were often at odds with one another. What I think Mazzuchelli does the best is how he uses color at the end. Spoiler Alert: As Asterios begins his journey to find Hana in Minnesota, the two color worlds slowly begin to combine. He makes the realization that he needs to find her and from that moment on, the color schemes become one, and the closer Asterios gets to Hana’s house, the more of the color spectrum we begin to see. Just some food for thought.

During the workshop today, I discovered something about Ernst’s collages. While creating my own collage, I realized that many of the pieces that I cut out I was giving new meaning to. For instance, I cut out a clown from a rather harmless children’s book. His face in my collage now looks like one of satirical nature. It goes to show that objects out of context have their meaning redefined. Which made me think about Ernst’s collages. For all I know, Ernst was collecting images of animals from a Charles Darwin book. Ernst then repurposed possibly harmless images to something of a satirical or horrific nature. I think it would be interesting to know where Ernst got his images from. In the collage I created today, almost all of my images were from the same text, one about nature. However, when I reorganized the images from a book of nature, I made a commentary about the destruction of nature by humans. I just found that I would be interesting to see if Ernst might have done something similar giving even more, commentary on already fascinating images.