Karmen
Guillem March, story & art
Image Comics, 2022
The story opens with Catalina (Cata) and her friend Xisco as schoolchildren. Ten years later, the pair are romantically involved, but it's complicated: Xisco has a couple of other female friends, and Cata is sure that he plans to leave her. Karmen enters, looking like a cute young woman in a skeleton costume. Except maybe it's not a costume, as she seems to have supernatural powers. She catches Cata in the act of committing suicide by slashing her wrists. Cata is naked, but Karmen assures her that no one will be able to see her, and they leave the apartment to go outside. Before long Cata has figured out how to fly, so we get some beautiful panoramic scenes--like a superhero comic, but naked.
They discuss Cata's life, and how her next incarnation might go. So, it's apparently Karmen as in karma; she's really not the "angel" some of the publisher's blurbs describe her as. When Cata meets a recently deceased man, he loans her his jacket, and the self-conscious nakedness comes to an end. Karmen reports back to her base, and is scolded for taking too much initiative when doing her job. Cata accidentally discovers that Xisco was trying to figure out how to declare his love for her. It turns out that Karmen's interventions have actually returned souls to their bodies to live a new, better life, based on what they learned about themselves in their time with her after their deaths.
Cata's life is restored, but at the expense of her memory of her after-death events. Yet memories seem to poke through: she remembers someone named Karmen, and the location of the engagement ring lost by the man who loaned her his jacket. With that, she is able to let go of the dim recollections and go on with her new life with Xisco. The collection concludes with several pages of striking process art (including sketches and location photos) and a cover gallery (including covers by Milo Manara and David Mack). This is a remarkable story, with March's charming art equal parts metaphysics and human emotion.
Replies
I enjoyed this, but couldn't have described it as well as you.
Wow, thanks Cap!
Captain Comics said:
Sounds really cool!