Daytripper

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Week eleven of our history and literature of comics romp, we set our fazers to
comics as contemporary literature. Contrary to the comics that we have focused on the prior weeks these comics especially have strategically complicated narratives and themes, that are essential to the effectiveness of the story-telling. This week I read Daytripper, by Gabriel Bas and Fabio Moon. The story follows Bras, a Brazilian obituary writer, on his thirty-second birthday, who’s researching for a new obituary assignment for a very famous well-loved man. Bras is wrestling with his career, troubled by the fact that he writes only about death, but dreams about writing about life. We find out eventually that Bras is one of the sons of the famous and influential man he’s writing the obituary about. Bras visits a few of the places that his father use to frequent for research, he takes a detour for a pack of smokes and inadvertently gets himself into a unfortunate predicament. The story is nonlinear, it shows the reader the last panel in the very beginning of the story. The comic has an overarching theme of “you can’t choose your family”. Daytripper is visually beautiful, the colors all throughout the comic are very muted and desaturated, the creators use contrast sparingly to really make the emphasis and important and surprising!


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