Daytripper, by Brazilian twins Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, is a series of stories and vignettes on the lives and deaths of Brás de Oliva Domingos, the son of a famous writer who hopes himself to be one day equally famous. He makes his living writing obituaries. As Craig Thompson puts it in his introduction, Daytripper is a meditation on mortality.
“Meditation” is perhaps the best word to use about this book. It’s a faceted work — we see Brás in various stages of life, some quite mundane, some filled with drama, and each story ends with his death, as a child, as a young man, as a new father flushed with the success of his first novel, as an established author in his prime, as an acclaimed artist at the end of his life. Each episode resonates against the others, building a picture that plays with time in a way that almost enters the realm of magical realism, except that these stories retain enough individuality that any substrate of surreality never intrudes itself — unless you count the matter-of-fact exoticism of the locales, but this does, after all, take place in Brazil, where the exotic (to us) is very much everyday (to them).
The graphic work is perfect — angular, rough-hewn, sometimes a little blocky, expressive in a way that creates a strong sense of reality in the characters and the settings, and sometimes, especially in chapter headings, showing a great deal of sophistication.
There’s not much more to say that’s to any real point — this is a book easy to enjoy, difficult to describe, and I’m not going to give you an episode-by-episode account. It’s not a book I would batter down the doors to acquire, but now that I have it, I’m very happy I didn’t have to.
(Vertigo, 2011)
