Daytripper
This is one of those comics that, every time I try to figure out the words to start out how I’m going to talk about it, I get flustered, lose my place, and then realize the next issue is already out. It’s a fantastic story, and I worry that no matter what I do I can’t even begin to do it justice in the long-run of things. After all, this is a story about life, about death, the brief aspect of existence that takes place in between those two concepts. We’re just seeing a glimpse, a small moment in time, that shows the fragility of it all.
Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon are brilliant storytellers are artists, crafting for us something that I couldn’t have even imagined reading even a year ago, in terms of the nature of the story. This ten issue mini-series published by Vertigo isn’t the sort of story that tells you everything outright. Not entirely. We’re told a story, a simple story, but we’re told it in different ways, at different times. It’s all part of it.
The two of them, at the end of the first issue, decide to give us a bit of a rundown as to what they came up with whenever they started the idea of “Daytripper”
The first time were asked what DAYTRIPPER was, we simply said, “It’s about life.” To which we heard a blunt “That’s it?”– followed by mutual silence. “You’re gonna need a much better answer than that,” the other person concluded.
[…]
Have you ever realized how our lives can change at any given moment? How you noticed how we can plan ahead all we want, but we’re always surprised by the unexpected? And that, afterwards, we end up with a sum of moments, both good and bad, that really define who we are, what we want, and what we love? Well, such roller coasters of ordinary life happen every day, and that’s what DAYTRIPPER is about.
Cut to one year later, and here we are. Time to stop telling and start showing. Let us all now meet Brás de Oliva Domingos, wannabe writer, and follow him around as he tries to figure out his life. Let’s put ourselves in his shoes and see where they take us.
[…]
And so, “Daytripper” is a story about the life of a man named Brás. An obituary writer who longs for something more in his life, but is gunned down on his birthday, at the age of 32. He’s killed in a bar, a rather meaningless death, “a senseless waste of human life” as it were. He was killed simply because the circumstances of that situation caused him to be there. He could have been elsewhere, but he wasn’t. Such was that trip in the day of Brás.
It sets the scene for the entirety of the book, of the story that we’re presented. This is not the adventures of the man, as the creators tell us. No, there is no capes, no evil men that need a punch to their face or wrongs that need writing with force. This is just life, in all of its essential melancholy and tedium. It just so happens that at the end of every aspect of this story, our protagonist happens to die in a way that is someone less-than-pleasant. But that is all part of it.
The day trips, you might say, help bring us closer to Brás, help us to understand just who he is, and where he comes from in his life. At age 32, he lives under the shadow of his father, a successful writer, as he desperately works on a novel that he knows he will never successfully finish, only to meet his end uneventfully in a bar just outside of the party he left to go get matches.
But with the next issue, we go back in time to a young, 21-year-old Brás, who drowns during a festival in Salvador while trying to find a woman who he had found particularly interesting earlier. Again, just another day, showing us just how quickly life can end if things change just ever-so-slightly. And this is the story of our character, our man who isn’t the hero of the day, fighting the man with the gimmick.
We see him at 32, 21, 28, 41, 11, 33, and 38 so far. Where the other three years could be I have no idea. But that isn’t really the point with a story like this. Here we aren’t talking about just how he died. In fact, how he died is always, typically, the last panel of the last page, with a small obituary caption telling us briefly about the man he was just then during that point in his life.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this series, of these stories, is that even though they are all different points in his life, wherein every single one ends with his death, they are all still connected somehow. There is a continuity among them all. At 33, there was a plane crash that traumatized his friend. He died on the way to meet him. At 38, years later, he gets a postcard from that friend, and finally goes to meet him after not seeing him for years, only to die at his hands. “He died because he believed in friendship.” as it says at the end of the issue. So we come to notice that, even though he dies at the end of every issue, that is only one way the story could go. There are, obviously, so many other ways.
That, too, I believe is part of the point of the story. It is, as they said in the beginning, about life. And we’re witnessing life as we go.
But, of course, this raises a rather interesting question: Is there a real life for Brás? And if so, did it end during one of the currently seven issues out there? Or is this all just a series of what-ifs in his mind or in his heart? He could have died that day, that could have been him. The same line of thought that gave us Jorge, living out in the desert, and in his altered state killing Brás and himself from the inability to cope with the trauma, and the grief of everything that encompassed him involving the plane crash so many years ago. Perhaps he actually died as he did in issue five, a young boy of 11. The windows into his life that we see both before and after that are merely wishes of a life that could have been– something that was given to him by loved ones.
Or maybe none of the deaths that we have seen, or will see in the last issues of the comic, at his deaths. Maybe his real death is still one to come, one we don’t see because it isn’t the one we were meant to see. Because the deaths, as I said in the beginning, maybe aren’t the key to this story. Maybe the deaths are actually just showing us the fragility of life and all. The kind of things that could kill us at any moment, showing us just how easily our life could be snuffed out. But at the same time, there is a certain amount of humor involved with the notion that in issue #6, he’s killed going to see his friend, only to die, in the immediate issue after, by his friend after five years between the two issues. All the while, he seems to have no acknowledgement of these things.
Save for a few instances, as well, we never actually see him in a state of dying. Most of the issues simply close on the thing that killed him, whatever it might have been, and we’re given the obituary, and we acknowledge that he is dead. It’s just the way the situations are set up– that, in this instance, this moment, this thing is what killed him.
It may be difficult to say, given how there are issues still to be published, but I think this may very well be one of my favorite things to come out of Vertigo in a while. Out of comics, for that matter. It’s a wonderful, touching collection of things that are simply a day in the life of a man, and the things that shape him into who he is and, sometimes, kill him. It’s life, it’s death, it’s love. It’s humanity represented so basically, so plainly, in just 28 wonderfully drawn pages.
I forgot to talk about the art. Silly me.
The art of this comic is also wonderful. It almost looks like watercolor painted over something that is so strikingly different from modern artists like Jim Lee, Stuart Immonen, and others. This isn’t a good thing, nor is it a bad thing, as the superhero artist just would not work with this sort of thing. The characters are all stunningly average in their build and appearance, which lends credence to it all. That the people have nothing spectacular, but have some of the best use of shadows, shading, and appropriate overlays of color, make some scenes infinitely more memorable than others.
The colors aren’t particularly vibrant, except when they need to be, otherwise everything blends nicely, and, as I said, feels not unlike a painting.
But I would certainly not want this artist doing a traditional superhero comic. While I love the style, and I love superhero comics, his is suited for storytelling, and for people. Not for the posturing and the near-arrogance that seems to come from superhero comics. It would cheapen the art, almost.
In the end, you should get this comic. Not just get it, but follow it, for these last issues, and see just how great it is. You surely won’t be disappointed, and if you are, then maybe you look for different things in comics outside of “quality storytelling” and instead would want to pick up something like anything by Rob Liefeld.
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