‘Karmen #1’ Covers Some Heavy Subject Matter: A Review

Creator: Guillem March / Image Content warning: Suicide Before I start this review in proper, I think it’s important to state plainly that Karmen is very much for mature audiences. And very crucially, it’s important to state that the main events of the story hinge around a character’s suicide. It’s a dark story. Although, it tries to approach the metaphysical debates of life and death with a degree of levity to a certain degree of success. Karmen starts with a philosophical monologue that pivots into a flashback twenty some years in the past focusing on Catalina before wrapping that monologue up and slowly and surely eventually ending up back at the present day where Catalina is having a particularly bad day. And divine intervention comes in the form of the quirky angel and titular character, Karmen. Karmen intervenes on the suicide attempt, and thus the strange meditation on life and death begins in proper. Karmen’s not the conventional reaper archetype. She is a lot more flippant, energetic, and otherwise bombastic type of character. She stands in stark contrast to say the ghosts from A Christmas Carol, a story mentioned in text, who are much more meditative and pensive. That said, Karmen is a decidedly kind character, and does care for Catalina in her moment of need and showcases a lot of empathy with bleak humor and off-color jokes.

From a writing perspective, I could draw some parallel’s with Donnie Darko or even Neil Gaiman’s iteration of Death, but ultimately, Karm…