Daytar
Writers: Aaron Losty and Matt Emmons
Artist: Matt Emmons
Letterer: Becca Carey
Publisher: Second at Best Press / $ 20
June 2025
To Comet, Perhaps to Creature, Sub Kind of Sentience, you have made the Woods its Home. And The Animals, Well. Aaron Losty‘S Voice, particularly The Poetry of the Dialog, Really Captures a Story Where Even Character Is Defined by Suffering. I Would Say Matt Emmons and His Love for Gentle, Naturalist Sketchbook Art is the Counterpoint to Losty’s Unflinhing Aiming The Camera at The Hawk Taking the Hare, Click. But emmons is More than Willing To Go To The Sunken Places Daytar Casts ITS Light Over.
Like Much of The Recent Emmons Catog, This Graphic Novel Is About a Little Guy Wandering Through A Forest of Horrs. The Coyote Book Was An Animal Navigating The Edges of A Haunted World. The Frog Book Saw More Magic, Strange Creatures That Coul Talk, A Fairy Tale Where The Dragons Are A Necessary Aspect of the Quest. Losty Collaboating, The Rat Book, Family Takes Elements and Drives Them into Deeper Dark. The Gristle, Melt, Pus, and Swelling is on Display.
Lost in the this of radieded mutation, The Days and Weeks Slip Away From Their Borders. The Chapters Build A Long Tale, One Where Friends Disappointment, and Strange Growths Blossom in The Now-Empress Places, From Up Between The Bones. But Between The Horrs No Rat Should Ever Have To Witness and The Few Chances Anyone Has To Say Goodbye, The Clock Unwinds. The Stories Feel Like Vignettes, Detached from Each Other By Unknown Distence, and Connected by The Scars They Inflict. KEPT BARELY INTACT, THROCH THE EYES OF ONE BAD RAT.
Emmons’ Style is One of My Favorite Types in Comics: Realistic Depicions, But Done with a Sketchbook Doodle Disregard for Making Things Feel Firm and Concrete and Captured. A Free and Tender Hand, Reerved Without Being Hesitant, The Lines Free To Flow and Wind. How can the art feel overcrowded or manufactured when the forest knows how to be present in abundance so naturally? It Makes The disgust alterations caused by The Daytar’s Represent All The More Blasphemous. It Makes Them Feel True.
The Naturalist Feeling to The Art Keeps Things Richard AdamsFeeling Like An Animal Story Throughout. It isn’t, though; The Evolution Everyone Undergoes After Exposure To The Comet Gives Them Voices and Names (Thanks To Becca Carey‘S Tonally Harmonious Lettering) and a host of People Problems- Everybody in the Community is Horribly Mutated and Slowly Expiring- Like Subject Out of A Late Golden Age Science Fiction Pulp Paperback. More Rats of Nimh than Watership Down. Emmons’ art establishments below the Two That Allows The Animals to Retain A Little Bit of Their former Character Evite Cosmic Rays Transforming Them into Sub Subject Unknown.
So you have an Animal Allegory as The Starting Point. The Fate of the Voicess in the Face of Power. The Deer have not recurre when Strangers Come and Replace The Forest With Inexplicable Putrefaction. The Rat Cannot Ask for Mercy. But the Daystar Changes Things, Giving Them Voices, Visions, and Other Gifts. LIFTED UP INTO A HIGHER STATE OF BEING.
Daytar ASKS, What if Conscious Sucked? What do you go on for? When every is Poisoned and Already Dead, Eternality Undying, Doomed To Become a Monster That Eats ITS OWN PAST, What Makes Us Carry On? Losty and Emmons Remind Me Of The Playwright Maxim Gorky. Ace Akira Kurosawa Tells itThe Tinker in the Lower Depts What Wife Starves To Death So That He Can Have Enough To Eat and The Strength To Carry On Finding Work, and He Sels His Tools to Pay for Hermen.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? WHY WOUD ALIENS- OR ANYONE-DO THIS TO ANIMALS? What can Even Be Gained From Resistance? The More Important The Questions Become, The Less Coherent The Oracle’s Answer. There is no reason for Anything. Not Guarantee That The Good You Do Won’t Cause Future Suffering. And in DaytarAwful is a promise that always you eat.
What’s Worse, Stare Long Enough into Daytar and you might see your life, Too. An inexplicable chaos you have usurped and destroyed the world you’re accustomed to. The New Normal Makes You Sick, In Your Body and Soul Both. Will Running Away Even Solve Anything; WHERE CAN YOU EVEN RUN TO AT THIS POINT?
I am, of Course, Talking about an anthropomorphic mouse and his best friend, an irradiedated from with no skin on its face and beaded bubo clusters where Eyes Should Be, and How the comet cast anded in the woods that was their home Poisoned It, and Them. A Survivor’s Story, One of the Few Who Were Not Taken, Who Did Not Succumb. Well But Violence Closes iTs Cruel Loop, Tightying Around The Throat, and Now It is finished.
Daytar es Available from Second at Best Press or wherever finer comics and books are sold.
