The author Shaun Tan does a very good job of packing his landscape portraits with metaphoric meaning. The story's subject is a man who leaves his family for another, less economically troubled country, to find work. There is no dialogue so the pictures often pack a lot of information by projecting the characters emotions out onto the world around them. The approach is similar to other works of expressionism like the Metamorphoses or the Cabinet of Dr. Calligari, except that when Tan uses it for his 'comic', it helps serve the structural need to show rather than tell in the most extreme sense. Even the Cabinet, which was a silent film, used title cards during scenes for dialogue.
I can't imagine the amount of effort the author put into each painting. Really beautiful.
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