For Fans of Daytripper

Daytripper is inseparable from Sao Paulo. The heat, the food, the family structures, the specific texture of middle-class Brazilian intellectual life in the early 2000s: all of it is rendered with the kind of specificity that only comes from having lived there. Moon and Ba grew up in Sao Paulo, and the city's rhythms become the book's rhythms. This is one reason Daytripper lands differently from American comics that traffic in similar themes: the emotional temperature is distinctly Latin American, closer to Marquez or Saramago than to anything published in New York.

Each chapter ends with Bras dying, and each time the death arrives at a moment when something has just become clear to him. Moon and Ba are not being cruel. They are making a structural argument: we only see what something meant once it is over. The repeated deaths are not nihilistic; they are a technique for forcing the reader to value what just happened on the page. By chapter ten, the trick works so well that a living Bras feels like the most surprising ending imaginable.