these comics have an exit

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Sometimes the most attractive thing a comic can offer is a last page. An actual last page, after which nobody needs to explain that the good part continues in three different books called volume one.

These three graphic novels give you a complete story in one paperback. That gets them through the door. The drawings are the reason to stay: a life assembled from memories, a city rendered in impossible colors, and a spacecraft that looks like it might need feeding.

daytripper: a whole life in the margins

Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper follows Brás de Oliva Domingos, an aspiring novelist who writes obituaries. Each chapter visits a different moment in his life, finding an ending and then asking you to reconsider the life around it. Work, family, love and disappointment give that structure its weight.

Look at the cover’s scale. Brás and a dog sit beneath an enormous profile filled with a typewriter, buildings and objects. The individual is small; the accumulated stuff of a life fills the page. Its shift from dark brown through pink into blue gives those memories a physical shape, rather than leaving the premise to a blurb.

That is a more useful invitation than simply calling it a comic about death. The 256-page collected paperback makes room for the ordinary things that an obituary compresses. This is the pick for human-scale drama, with grief and mortality built into the structure. DC’s edition listing has the collection details.

the many deaths of laila starr: death has been made redundant

Humanity is approaching immortality, which creates a staffing problem. In Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Death is sent to Mumbai to live as a mortal woman. She knows where the person who will make her obsolete is about to be born.

Andrade’s opening city page makes the setting an immediate attraction. Coral and lavender towers rise over a dense blue foreground; a curving elevated road pulls the eye across the lower half. The buildings are carefully drawn, but their colors refuse to behave like an architectural photograph. Before the divine office politics get going, Mumbai already has its own visual presence.

The cover pushes that palette harder, setting a turquoise figure against a hot orange city. If the premise sounds abstract, these pages supply texture and a place to get lost. The 128-page paperback collects all five issues, making this the shortest of the three. BOOM!’s first-look announcement introduces the book and its creators.

on a sunbeam: the spaceship is a fish

Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam moves between a crew restoring ruined structures in space and two girls falling in love at boarding school. The two timelines lead into a search for a lost love. It is the young-adult selection here, with queer romance and found family at its center.

The opening page gives the journey a wonderfully unhurried shape. Broad panels leave room for black space and scattered stars. A face in a cockpit window gives way to a fish-shaped craft beside a tall, floating building. Lavender, black and white do most of the work; the intricately drawn architecture makes this universe feel handmade rather than clinically futuristic.

At 544 pages in the First Second paperback, it is the long stay. You can also read the complete webcomic free on Walden’s official site, starting with chapter one. That is a much better way to see whether its rhythm suits you than taking anyone’s word for it.

Three different kinds of room to inhabit, and none requires a continuity chart. Start with the artwork that makes you want to turn the page.

Image credits: Daytripper cover, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, DC/Vertigo, via Penguin Random House Comics; The Many Deaths of Laila Starr cover, Filipe Andrade, BOOM! Studios, via PRH Comics. Laila Starr #1 opening-page preview: art Filipe Andrade, lettering AndWorld Design, ©2021 Ram V, BOOM! Studios; publisher preview via Comicsblog, original credit footer retained. On a Sunbeam cover via First Second/Macmillan; opening page from Tillie Walden’s official webcomic, ©Tillie Walden. Covers and brief page excerpts accompany discussion; rights remain with their respective owners. Featured library photograph: Davide Cantelli, CC0; illustrative, not a photograph of these books.