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By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 6/15/2009 2:10:00 PM

Award-winning author/illustrator Shaun Tan was already a star in his native Australia before he first gained nationwide attention in the U.S. with his brilliant wordless graphic novel, The Arrival (2007). Tan follows up with 15 extraordinary illustrated stories in Tales from Outer Suburbia (2009, both Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Bks.).

Were you surprised that The Arrival was such a hit in this country?
I was surprised that people reacted so positively to it because I was expecting it would be a disadvantage, in some ways, with a wordless book. I always worry that my work will seem obscure and that people will not know where to shelve it. But I’ve learned that the key to illustrated books is to let the reader do the work.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is so completely different.
While I was working on The Arrival, I started to work on this book, partly because of the urge to write—and also to switch styles and play with humor and have that immense variety. [Suburbia] is actually closer to my sketchbooks and closer to how I work when I don’t have an overriding project. I really love discontinuity, that dreamlike state of things like nonsequitors that have some undercurrent coherent meaning that’s on the surface.

What book made you a star in Australia?
There were suddenly picture books for older readers that dealt with fairly sophisticated themes, and the next book I did was called The Rabbits, and that’s what really established me in Australia. The Rabbits is an allegorical story about the colonial invasion of Australia in the 18th century but told in a very abstract way as the arrival of rabbits, because we have a rabbit plague.

Sounds like this was a precursor to The Arrival.
The Arrival originally started out as a 32-page picture book with some text. It was about loneliness but dealing with that from the point of view of an immigrant.

Did you originally plan for The Arrival to be wordless?
No, it had words in the beginning. The idea that interested me the most was the inarticulateness of many immigrants that I know—my dad being one. His English isn’t perfect and he will say something in a very abbreviated way about some experience he had coming to western Australia from Malaysia. But you know that contained in that simple statement there’s a whole adventure, and there’s a whole depth there, but it doesn’t communicate in the language.

Where I live there are a lot of Italian and Greek immigrants and if you ask them a question about the early days in Melbourne, they’d just say, “Oh it was very hard, very hard. Would you like a cup of tea?” And within that little phrase there’s a whole ocean of stuff but it just comes out as a few words.

Do you come from an artistic family?
My dad was an architect, but aside from that there was not this artistic tradition in my family. When I went to university, one career choice was biotechnology, and I actually had an interest in that. I thought maybe I could get a job as a scientist. My older brother is a geologist, so that seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But I ended up at the last minute saying, “I really want to study the humanities more because I don’t understand them.” So I did an arts degree. It’s kind of the degree to do when you don’t really know what you want to do. And I did philosophy, history, English literature, and fine arts, and whittled it down to a double major in fine arts and English literature.

Did it take you long to realize your real true passion?
When I think about it, I went through a very convoluted path to arrive at this realization that the things I love doing the most are the things I loved most when I was about five or six. So I kind of came full circle back to that, which is writing and drawing.

So how’d you get started?
One of the last things I was doing at university was a creative writing course. The whole time I’d been writing and everything, I’d been trying to get published in science fiction magazines originally as a writer. I was sending stuff away to them as a teenager, starting at about 15, and getting routinely rejected, but I didn’t mind. In fact it was kind of exciting to get a piece of paper that came from the United States.

In the early 90s, some Australians started to publish their own science fiction magazines. At that time I turned my attention to Australian magazines, thinking I might have a better chance with something local. And I still got rejected, which was fine because I got comments this time.

Did your art and science fiction writing go hand-in-hand?
The drawing and painting that interested me the most was fairly conventional—my going out and painting a landscape or painting a picture of my friend. It never really occurred to me to actually combine that with my interest in writing science fiction short stories. I’d seen it in magazines, and I thought that must be a pretty cool job, but my interest was so focused on writing. And painting just felt so separate—physically separate—because I was doing paintings on larger canvases.

So what made you decide to combine the writing with your art?
Just circumstance. I was getting rejected with these stories. So I thought what I should do is do a drawing and stick it on the front of a story, kind of like my cover letter.

You wanted to dress them up a little.
Yeah, I always had this visual image of a slush pile in the corner of a room where there’s a pile of unsolicited manuscripts that just get chucked in the corner. So I thought, well, if it’s got a picture on the front, they might go, ‘Oh, OK.’

Did it work?
The first drawing I did that was attached to a story had nothing to do with the story. It was just a drawing of a robot kangaroo standing in the desert with a ruined city in the background—real typical science fiction stuff. And so I got this letter back from the editor who said. “The story idea is not so original, so we probably won’t use it. But we really like this image you did, and can we use it as a cover for the next issue?”

When did you start these fantastic drawings?
Everything for me happens gradually. I can’t remember a time when I just had some eureka moment. I was influenced by Tolkien and stuff like that when I was about 12, and I do remember drawing Hobbits and goblins.

Having an architect dad certainly had an influence on you.
Yes, even when I look at some drawings I did as a child, there are lots of drawings of spaceships and things like that. So I was always doing the science fiction stuff as a kid. And they look like house plants wrapped around spaceships, where I’ve drawn all the ducts and air vents and doors.

Did your parents ever try to talk you out of taking this career path?
My dad only became comfortable with the whole thing when I was able to show him my tax return when it reached a certain level.

Now that you’ve worked with Pixar are they going to steal you away?
I don’t think I can ever be stolen away from books. Books are the most convenient form of expression for an individual creator. I can’t think of anything that beats that.

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