Review: ‘Carmen Red Claw #4’ Wraps Up Wonderfully In The Weird West

Welcome to the table,

The nature of good and evil has always weighed on me. If you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family, you are a thief. If you let your family die of hunger, you are a murderer. There is always a cost for every decision, a consequence to every action, and those consequences can ripple out generationally in some cases, shifting and changing lives and minds even long after you are dust.

Mike Mignola and Rae Allen seem to fully understand this as they bring the first story arc of Carmen Red Claw to a close with #4 of their Belly of the Beast storyline. Let’s get into it.

The story picks up from the last issue with Carmen bleeding in the desert as she continues to hunt down occult-scientist castle rustlers and their floating train. It’s sentences like that that make this such a fun book to read. You know the suspension of disbelief is in full swing when you have such an eccentric mix of material. You still go along for the ride because all of those elements are blended in such a way that they feel intentional and, what’s more, natural, or in this case, supernatural.

Carmen, due to the blood loss and her connection to the otherworldly powers that pull strings all around us, has multiple flashbacks as this issue progresses, giving some insight into the weight of the blood that pumps in her veins and pools in her boots. The weight of legacy is heavy in this issue as Carmen reflects multiple moments of her father’s brutality and her mothers caring, trying to find where she herself lands on the cosmic wheel and if she is destined to become them or her own person.

Allen’s art feels like it slows down in this issue, giving each moment more weight and providing some really impactful panels that inform Carmen’s state of mind as she is making her way towards Zinco and the missing cattle.

The back half of the issue sees Carmen entering a cave where a massive eldritch statue is sitting in the center of a small lake of blood, blood that is being harvested from all the stolen cattle to seemingly summon the eldritch entity in order to make a deal with it to acquire more land. The greed and stupidity of the selfishly wealthy in this book are timeless. The designs of the foolish are quickly answered in an ancient, brutal fashion, as the eldritch creature divorces the head from the body, sending it sinking into the blood lake.

The eldritch creature then attempts to employ Carmen to usher in a new race of man. Carmen, of course, declines, and we get some really cool origin information about her companion, the floating lizard Yargoss, who has more unique beginnings than I was expecting. I will leave them out of this review because I think they may have relevance to other tales set in the well-storied world. It’s worth your time reading the issue if you care about such things.

Carmen Red Claw is a fun ride through the Weird West that establishes another exciting character in the well-storied world that brought us Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. It’s perfect for fans of the fantastical as well as long-time occult enthusiasts who want more of the world of wonder they love.

Until next time, I never did trust that baby… still don’t.