Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan.

Tan follows up his amazing The Arrival with another unique look at modern society, this time focusing on the peculiar world of suburbia.  Rather than one story, this book is a series of short stories or vignettes with a common theme.  It is a cohesive book, but one that surprises in wonderful ways.  Tan captures the odd and unique in a way that makes it all seem normal and every day.  The tone is exactly right and the stories are utterly believable but at the same time magical and strange.

The stories move from vary in the amount of images and text.  Some are almost all text and others are nearly graphic novel amounts of images.  Tan created a table of contents using stamps that bear images from the stories.  I found myself turning back to the table of contents to discover what the matching stamp looked like.  Just a glimpse of the whimsy and unique approach that Tan uses.

I was going to list my favorite stories, but they are the vast majority of the book.  Each story stands on its own, but also contributes to the whole.  In turn, Tan’s art changes from story to story in both style and medium.  He is almost chameleon-like in this book, yet his voice stays true and on target.

Highly recommended where The Arrival was popular.  Make sure this gets in the hands of graphic novel fans and artists.  Fans of Ray Bradbury short stories will also adore this.  Tan writes with much the same spirit and takes similar risks in his stories.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan.

I had expected to see this honored by the Printz Committee, but that was not to be…  I consider this one of the top graphic novels of the year for two reasons.  First, I heard buzz about it from those in the graphic-novel know.  Second, I personally loved it.

The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel that tells the story of a man who is forced to leave his wife and child behind and head to a new country.  The land he leaves behind is shadowed with long reptilian tails filled with spikes.  The world he finds when he lands is filled with strange beings, machines that make no sense, and a society he cannot comprehend.  But he struggles on, his small white alien-like being at his side, until he can bring his family to be with him.  The girl is astonished at the new world, but soon learns her own way around and finds herself able to lend a newcomer a hand.

The beauty of this book is in the discovery.  It reads as a science fiction/fantasy graphic novel at first until the reader slowly realizes that the strangeness of the world is really revealing aspects of the universal struggle of immigrants to a new land.  There is a moment where readers will suddenly comprehend the book, and if they are anything like me will gasp and sigh in great satisfaction. 

The illustrations are wondrous, creating a world of astonishing detail, different enough from our own world to make the confusion universal.   Done in black and white and sepia, they combine an old-world quality with science fiction subjects. 

Highly recommended for teens and late elementary students ages 11-17.