Daytripper #7 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (writing/art), Dave Stewart (colors), Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: Will Bras be able to find his missing friend Jorge and what will happen when they get back together?

What’s Good: I still don’t really know where this storyline is going.  Wait, why am I listing that as a “good thing?”  Well, I’ll tell you: I spend more time trying to figure Daytripper out than any other comic I read.

I read about 60 new comics every month, so that doesn’t leave me tons of time to ponder the intricacies of someone’s obtuse plot.  Usually when I read a book that is just a little too “meta” (e.g. Batman #700 this week), I just grunt and pick up the next book on the stack because I’m annoyed that the writer is making it so darn hard (or perhaps trying to be a little more clever than the writing/art skills of the book will allow).  However, with Daytripper, I have really spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Ba and Moon are up to with this story.  I have NO answer yet, but I am fairly sure that it isn’t a knock off of “you killed Kenny!” from South Park.  This will make a great collected edition!

This issue was very interesting because for one of the few times in this series, events in this issue directly reference back to the prior issue.  The only time we’ve seen that before was with some of Bras’ girlfriends/wives, but even those stories did not feel as tightly tied as issues 6 and 7.

In the last issue, we saw Bras worrying that his good friend Jorge had been killed in a plane crash.  At the end of the issue, we learned that Jorge was alive, but had become disturbed/depressed and decided to “check out” of life and go on walkabout.  That issue ended with Bras dying in a logging truck accident while trying to go find his friend.  This issue again shows Bras looking for Jorge, but it is years later.  The search and reunion are touching and the end was pretty shocking/brutal (especially how it ties into a postcard that Jorge had sent to Bras).  Part of this series’ shtick is killing Bras at the end of each issue, so it does remind me very much of watching early episodes of South Park to see what interesting way Kenny would die.  This death for Bras really caught me off guard and that’s saying something because you read the entire issue with an eye towards the death at the end.