Book Review: DAYTRIPPER – Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba & Craig Thompson

I stumbled onto Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba entirely by accident nearly two decades ago, when international graphic novels were new to India. I fell immediately in love with the medium and with their stories in De:Tales : Stories from Urban Brazil. I was gifted Ursula by an anonymous reader of my writing, which made it another special milestone. And in the early days of blogging and then Twitter, I found their handles and tagged them in an appreciation tweet. To my surprise, they responded enthusiastically saying that they had no idea they had fans in India. It was a great time when the internet was young and social media was nice. Appropriately, I came across this book, DAYTRIPPER also by serendipity when I spotted it in a rummage bookstore that I was visiting for the first time. Stores like that have a sort of magic, don’t they?

Daytripper is such an apt book for me to be reading at this time. I’m the same age as the writer-illustrator twins. While their early books were coming-of-age narratives that I could relate to from across continents, this book is a perfect midlife crisis landscape. We look back with gloom, we look forward with dread, we stare at our present in confusion. And then something from the past rescues us and shoots us towards a future we hadn’t noticed. And that in turn, zings us back to a past we almost took but didn’t. Daytripper is just like that.

It’s filled with a lot of stories about Bras (the protagonist), all of which end in the exact same way. They happen at different points in his life, different places, moods, and situations and they all come to the exact same point but all the endings sound different. It is up to you to decide which one is the best one, the truest narrative of his life. Or maybe you’ll realise it doesn’t matter because all those lifetimes are his life, all the people that he has been, belong in his identity. He doesn’t have to choose just one. And neither do we.