Daystar
Writers: Aaron Losty and Matt Emmons
Artist: Matt Emmons
Letterer: Becca Carey
Publisher: Second At Best Press / $20
June 2025
A comet, perhaps a creature, some kind of sentience, has made the woods its home. And the animals, well. Aaron Losty’s voice, particularly the poetry of the dialog, really captures a story where every character is defined by suffering. I would say Matt Emmons and his love for gentle, naturalist sketchbook art is the counterpoint to Losty’s unflinching aiming the camera at the hawk taking the hare, click. But Emmons is more than willing to go to the sunken places Daystar casts its light over.
Like much of the recent Emmons catalog, this graphic novel is about a little guy wandering through a forest of horrors. The coyote book was an animal navigating the edges of a haunted world. The frog book saw more magic, strange creatures that could talk, a fairy tale where the dragons are a necessary aspect of the quest. Losty collaborating, the rat book, takes familiar elements and drives them into deeper dark. The gristle, melt, pus, and swelling is on display.
Lost in the throes of radiated mutation, the days and weeks slip away from their borders. The chapters build a long tale, one where friends disappear, and strange growths blossom in the now-empty places, from up between the bones. But between the horrors 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 distance, and connected by the scars they inflict. Kept barely intact, through the eyes of one bad rat.
Emmons’ style is one of my favorite types in comics: realistic depictions, but done with a sketchbook doodle disregard for making things feel firm and concrete and captured. A free and tender hand, reserved without being hesitant, the lines free to flow and wind. How can the art feel overcrowded or fabricated when the forest knows how to be present in abundance so naturally? It makes the repugnant alterations caused by the daystar’s presence all the more blasphemous. It makes them feel true.
The naturalist feeling to the art keeps things Richard Adams, feeling 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 something out of a late golden age science fiction pulp paperback. More Rats of NIMH than Watership Down. Emmons’ art establishes a continuity between the two that allows the animals to retain a little bit of their former character despite cosmic rays transforming them into something unknown.
So you have an animal allegory as the starting point. The fate of the voiceless in the face of power. The deer has no recourse 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.
Daystar asks, what if consciousness sucked? What do you go on for? When everything is poisoned and already dead, eternally 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. As Akira Kurosawa tells it, the tinker in the lower depths whose wife starves to death so that he can have enough to eat and the strength to carry on finding work, and he sells his tools to pay for her burial.
Why is this happening? Why would 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. No guarantee that the good you do won’t cause future suffering. And in Daystar, awful is a promise that always comes true.
What’s worse, stare long enough into Daystar and you might see your life, too. An inexplicable chaos has 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 irradiated deer with no skin on its face and beaded bubo clusters where eyes should be, and how the comet that landed 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, tightening around the throat, and now it is finished.
Daystar is available from Second At Best Press or wherever finer comics and books are sold.
