The reader shares his bafflement and gradually grasps with him how his strange new homeland works. Unable to make himself understood, he resorts to making simple drawings to communicate his need for a room. This experience comes through in the wordless migration parable The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006), which follows a man who has gone on ahead of his wife and children to seek work abroad and struggles to navigate his alien surroundings and their indecipherable language. It’s never too late, though, to try stretching your brain – both sides of it when it comes to graphic novels, where looking is as important as reading. Not everyone has grown up reading comics and the demands of their various verbal and visual literacies can take some adjusting to, particularly if you’re used to the orderly typesetting of prose novels. The recent hoo-ha about the Man Booker prize’s longlisting of a graphic novel for the first time, the chilling, understated Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, may have piqued your interest in exploring this ever-expanding medium further, or perhaps for the first time. The Guardian has a little list: “From Maus to Tamara Drewe: the 10 graphic novels everyone should read”.
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