These are fairy tales for modern times, in which there is valor, love and wisdom—without dragons and castles. The accompanying illustrations vary widely in style, medium and palette, reflecting both the events and the mood of each story, while hewing to a unifying sense of the surreal. ... Graphic-novel and text enthusiasts alike will be drawn to this breathtaking combination of words and images. Kirkus Star review
Tales from Outer Suburbia is an anthology of fifteen short illustrated stories based on my memories of growing up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world; a visit from a nut-sized foreign exchange student, a sea creature on someone’s front lawn, a new room discovered in a family home, a sinister machine installed in a park, a wise buffalo that lives in a vacant lot. The real subject of each story is how ordinary people react to these incidents, and how their significance is discovered, ignored or simply misunderstood. Shaun Tan
Stories in this book are: The Water Buffalo; Eric; Broken Toys; Distant Rain; Undertow; Grandpa's Story; No other country; The Nameless Holiday; The Amnesia Machine; Stick figures; Alert but Not Alarmed; Wake; Make your own pet; Our expedition; Night of the Turtle Rescue.
I was already familiar with many of the stories in this collection especially Eric which I love (and I gifted to a young friend named Eric).
On a recent visit to Gleebooks a customer called in to ask about Shaun Tan and Rachel Robson mentioned Tales from Outer Suburbia to the customer. She talked about binging the whole television series over one weekend and how she really thought this production deserved a lot more attention. Now jump forward a few weeks. I was visiting our local charity book sale and spied a copy of Tales from Outer Suburbia for just AUS$2 - a mint condition paperback copy.
If you are a casual or substitute teachers try to find a copy of this book - these short stories will create magic with any class.
The story ‘Broken Toys’ developed from a drawing of an old-fashioned deep-sea diver approaching a suburban corner deli (one near my home), which naturally raised for me the question of why he was there, and where he came from. A second idea came from the fact that as children, my brother and I often lost toys over the back fence into a neighbour’s yard, although I’m happy to say that they never came back chopped in half as they do in the story. Shaun Tan
The real idea for this story came from an anecdote told to me by a taxi-driver one day on my way to an airport. He described an incident in Lebanon where a dud missile had somehow ended up in the middle of a suburban street, and some local people seized the opportunity to take it home, disassemble it and sell it off as scrap metal. It provoked a secondary scenario in my mind, of children finding an unexploded missile, and converting it into a ‘space rocket’ cubby-house. Shaun Tan
Here are two quotes that resonated with me from Shaun Tan's ALMA acceptance essay:
Books offer the freedom to make up our own minds, the best stories being not at all instructive or moralizing but rather asking very well-crafted questions in an entertaining way, inspiring further creative thought.
If my work has a collective theme, it’s something like this: ‘reality is just another strange story’. It’s something we constantly narrate to ourselves through this peculiar invention of language and pictures; a project that begins in childhood and never really ends. Great books become part of our own map of experience: through reading we grasp the power and unity of our own thought and feeling. We are invited to empathise with others, to see the world from alternative angles, to wonder what it would be like to live differently, and to not feel alone when we constantly ask: ‘what if?’
After you read the BOOK of Tales from Outer Suburbia
switch on your television and enjoy the fantastic animated series. There are ten episodes of about 20 minutes each.
I’ve always been open to the idea of taking ideas from a book transferring and transforming them into different dramatic forms. The important thing for me is not plot or even character; it’s a certain sense of place, a certain spirit, a certain way of seeing things. Shaun Tan
Read this interview with
Shaun Tan and the Australian Children's Television Foundation.
I would follow Tales from Outer Suburbia with these two (one has a page from Shaun Tan):
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