illustrator’. He explains that his first published illustrations, at about the age of 16, were for small press science-fiction magazines and that ‘when I go to something like the world fantasy convention and I talk to the other illustrators there I feel slightly more kinship’. He says that one of his lesser known books, The Bird King, a collection of sketches representing various aspects of the working process and not initially intended for publication, is particularly popular with this group and that ‘if I was buying one of my books this is the one I would buy’.
On reflection, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so taken aback. Tan’s work contains many of the tropes of the science fiction genre, in particular the way that he offers us a defamiliarised version of our actual world. Stylistically, he also acknowledges various science fiction influences, such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and, in the dystopian elements of The Lost Thing, 1984. It is also a genre associated with obsession, and Tan readily admits to being obsessed with drawing and painting from the age of six: ‘This is the thing I like doing,’ he says modestly.
laughs when I ask if it reflects his own character, adamant that it does not. He even admits to sometimes being ‘frustrated by how the books turn out’ in the sense that he does not always feels fully in control of what emerges. ‘I’ve been writing lately a lot of stories about animals,’ he says, ‘and I’m dismayed that so many are dark.’ He thinks that the darkness perhaps occurs because narratively it offers more of a sense of the universal, that ‘it’s almost like we agree more about what’s dark’ and that, as a writer, ‘you can turn up the volume more on the darkness’.
Nowhere is Tan’s commitment to his work more apparent than in the process by which he came to write The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that tells the story of a man who leaves his family behind to migrate to a strange, foreign land on the other side of a vast ocean. It is an astonishing book, five years in the making, including two spent simply figuring out how it could be done. While his other books ‘evolved intuitively’, this one was ‘stylistically focused on learning from other people’s work’. He drew on Raymond Briggs’ books, ‘particularly The Snowman, which has a very similar format’, as well as graphic novelists such as Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. He also learned about the craft of the graphic novel by studying Scott McCloud’s seminal Understanding Comics, a kind of meta- comic, explaining the graphic form through the graphic form itself. Most importantly he learned from McCloud about ‘the gutter’, the space between panels, which is ‘almost more important than the panels themselves’. This enabled Tan to ‘cut everything down to the minimum’, something of a relief given that he ‘didn’t want to spend the rest of my life drawing this thing’.
The Arrival still very much carries Tan’s instinct for what works. Initially, he followed McCloud’s advice that characters should have simplified faces to allow readers to identify with them. So his figures in early drafts were highly stylised, with dots for eyes. It is hard to imagine the book being nearly as effective as it is had Tan not chosen to switch to a photo-realist style of drawing, which ‘though it felt stylistically dodgy just worked’.
It is hard to categorise Shaun Tan’s work. It is certainly popular with children and widely used in schools for a variety of purposes, but his themes and the richness of his imagery also make him appeal to a wider, more adult readership. I’m still slightly taken aback when, in response to being asked how he would position himself, he says ‘if I had to pick, I would have to say science fiction and fantasy
Tan feels a kinship with other groups too, ‘with fine artists, with film- makers and cartoonists and children’s book illustrators’. He behaves, he says, ‘like a magpie, picking bits from all of them’. I’m not so sure about the magpie analogy. I think that Tan’s work whatever the influences it bears, is so distinctive, so of itself, that it deserves a category all of its own. And if such a grand claim does not fit comfortably with Tan’s own modest demeanour, then perhaps the words he applies to Maurice Sendak’s ‘perfectly structured’ Where the Wild Things Are, which he often reads to his three year old daughter, can equally stand for his own work: ‘It’s a bit weird. It’s very honest’.
Books mentioned The Bird King, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-1-8487-7050-8, £14.99 hbk The Lost Thing, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0-7344-1138-9, £9.99 pbk The Arrival, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0-7344-1586-8, £10.99 pbk The Rabbits, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0-7344-1136-5, £7.99 pbk The Red Tree, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0-7344-1137-2, £7.99 pbk Tales from Outer Suburbia, Templar Publishing, 978-1-8401-1313-6, £12.99 hbk The Rules of Summer, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0-7344-1067-2, £14.99 hbk
Andrew McCallum is Director of the English and Media Centre.
Books for Keeps No.219 July 2016 9
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