Karmen #5 // Review
It isn’t easy for a spirit to travel in the right direction after death...particularly if the angel sent to deliver it isn’t particularly interested in getting it to go in the right direction. Maybe justice is difficult to come by. Maybe there’s some sense of injustice in death. And maybe nudging that death in the right direction could change things, as one particular angel of death is about to find out in the fifth and final issue of Karmen. Writer/artist Guillem March closes out a very emotionally engaging tale of life, death, and the supernatural with a satisfying end that is somewhat breathtakingly nuanced.
Cata has had a hell of a journey since her last moments in the tub. She’s dead. She’s been guided around by a whimsical angel of death known as Karmen. She’s come to understand things in a way that she never had before in life, and now she’s resigned to learn something in death that she should have learned in life. And maybe you only really learn how to live after you’ve died. Meanwhile, Karmen’s supervisors are having a hell of a time knowing what to do about the fact that she’s spending so much time with those she’s escorting to the afterlife. They might just learn something from reviewing her report.
It’s incredibly difficult to craft a story that genuinely engages a reader’s emotions in a very, very narrow span of time. In just five slim issues, March has given Cata a tremendous amount of emotional resonance. Part of this comes in the form of the fact that she’s decided to kill herself, so there’s an automatic sense of concern for her. The final issue of the series brings her vividly to the page with very little dialogue on her part. There’s likely more dialogue in this issue than there has been in any previous issue, but so much of it is wrapped up in the bureaucracy of the afterlife. The story doesn’t rest there, though. So much of the story exists in nonverbal moments between the balloons. It’s all so very, very subtle and ephemeral, just like life. And...as March would seem to suggest...it’s just like death too.
The final issue of Karmen is as much a farewell to the visual world of the story as it is a farewell to the characters. March’s gorgeous fish-eye panels bend and curve warmly around the center of the action. Subtleties in posture and facial expressions resonate through some sumptuously still emotional moments. Karmen comes across with admirable heroism for someone whose only real power is optimism. Sometimes that’s enough. The subtle shades of emotional change show Cata in a profoundly heroic light as well.
Guillem March’s Karmen has been so deliciously idiosyncratic. Everything about the world delivers a very specific personality to the panel, from the strange specifics of the afterlife to the gentle curving of straight architectural lines around the edges of the action. It’s all so very, very beautiful, delivering a mood to the comics page that is rarely attempted and almost never accomplished. March has done precisely one hell of a job with Karmen.
