After viewing this comic, I have to admit that I didn’t follow the entire story. The comic does, for the most part, work well without words, but the beginning in particular is hard to figure out. I know what’s happening, but I don’t know why it’s happening or how it later fits in to the story that happens. In the beginning there’s a man packing up his things and then he and his family leave their town that’s being attacked or taken over by weird tentacle things. Then there’s a boat and a montage of clouds and I don’t understand why those are important. After the boat lands, a man gets off, who I don’t think is the same guys from the beginning because the wife and daughter are gone now. So, then there’s an interesting story that happens with this guy, about him coming to this new town and seeing how magnificent and grand it is and how he makes friends and gains a little creature companion. It’s able to tell this story so well, because the images chosen illustrate the concepts very clearly. If they guy is suppose to be confused about something, the illustrated draws him looking confused and focuses on it. When he tries to show us how strange and amazing this new city is, he shows large pictures with the whole city so we feel the scale and then close up pictures of strange oddities that the character comes across. I know what he is feeling because the illustrator shows me how to feel. There are places though, where I’m not sure what things mean, I guess at them, but they aren’t fully clear. Maybe the illustrator intended that to be left to the reader or maybe I’m just not getting it, but there’s one part where the main character meets an Asian lady and for some reason they both have pieces of paper with pictures on them but the Asian ladies segments into a flash back or an explanation and I’m not sure what it means. Like, is that image a picture of her when she first came to this new city? Or is it a picture of a girl (like maybe her daughter) who is lost (which is why she has an ad about her?) I’m not sure. So, I’d say for the most part, It doesn’t need the words for the reader to get it, but some of the trickier concepts are naturally just harder to convey with images alone.
