Daytripper

SCORE: 4/5

Author: Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Dates read: May 8 – May 14, 2018

Version: paperback published by Vertigo (DC Comics) February 8, 2011

Categories: graphic novel, comic, fantasy

What are the important or defining moments of your life? What would you obituary say if you died at those stages in your life?

Daytripper is a reflective graphic novel that follows the life of Bras, the son of a famous Brazilian writer. Bras writes obituaries for a living while he attempts to achieve his dream of following his father’s footsteps. Each chapter of Daytripper brings us to a different age and different moments throughout Bras’ life.

As we see in Bras’ writing, obituaries describe the facts about a person and the life they lived, but it fails to capture the soul and heart of what life really is – how momentous small and quiet moments can be. Daytripper is reflective, melancholy, uplifting, and heartbreaking just like all lives are; through the storytelling you can easily feel like you’re seeing the deepest parts of a man’s soul.

Daytripper is a profound story on a heavily overdone and easily cliched topic, but it isn’t cliche. It’s new and haunting. It’s about the small moments that collectively add up to what we view life to be. It’s about the moments that stick and realizing that the events that matter and define us are not always the biggest and brightest.