Blog 10

Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan

The tales are the epitome of quirky, with secret poetry gathering like a snowball into an enormous ball in the sky, leaf-like exchange students, and instructions on making your own pet. I liked visiting this strange, enchanting world, where water buffalos point you in the right direction. There's something about Shaun Tan's books that are so ethereal and otherworldly it's like sitting at the edge of a very high cliff and quietly watching the clouds as they move past your feet. Tales from Outer Suburbia is no different, and it's like I want to absorb the book into my skin. The most obvious thing to compare to this, if comparisons are something we have to make, is The Twilight Zone. The last time suburbia got this skewered with the unknown, it was in that post-war Rod Serling era. Maybe history repeats itself. Maybe our new era with our new president and our new hope in the American dream means that suburbia will once again take on those mythic qualities it was once thought to have. In the past Shaun Tan has said that the notion of suburban communities has always fascinated , why not? Suburbia is a state of safety and collective agreement that can go terribly wrong when left to its own devices. There’s a kind of insanity to it, and Tan has very delicately placed a finger on that insanity’s pulse. He will give you a sense of it, but you will never quite see the whole.