Still dealing with the sudden, horrifying loss of her father as a child, Carmina tries to make the best of her situation despite being stuck in an unhappy relationship and living in a trailer park. But after being riddled by strange nightmares that put her up against monstrous creatures all the way on the Philippine Islands, Carmina will soon realize there was more to her upbringing than her father had never revealed to her.
Carmina: A Filipino-American Urban Mythology #1: Beginnings
Mark A.J. Nazal, Erica Juliet, Joe Arciaga (writers), Roland Amago (artist/letterer), Kael Molo (epilogue pages)
Diwata Komiks
October 30, 2021
Diwata Komiks is a Filipino-American comics company, founded with the intentions of hoping to share and create more stories inspired by Philippine heritage and mythology. Carmina was published in conjunction with Filipino American History Month at the tail end of October, following Diwata Komiks’ own launch event collaborating with local Filipino cultural organizations in Los Angeles. As per its title, Carmina: Beginnings is but a mere introduction to Carmina and a much bigger world she herself is to face.
Carmina takes us to the titular character’s childhood, showing her close bond with her father. As a child, asks her father more about her presumably deceased mother, only to receive the usual repeated affirmations about her that she has already heard.
After tucking Carmina into bed, he struggles to fall asleep. In his dreams, a vision of a woman approaches him, addressing him lovingly, worried and concerned about the whereabouts of an amulet that has gone missing from his neck. Authorities conclude that Carmina’s father died from cardiac arrest in his sleep, but in actuality we see that some sort of vengeful, otherworldly entity literally ruptured his heart.
In the present day, Carmina’s adulthood is now stricken by a series of strange dreams that take her to the Philippines, where she’s pitted against various monsters and beasts of Filipino mythological lore. Unbeknownst to her, these visions are key to the secrets behind that tragedy that shaped her life.
Carmina #1 is but an introduction and set up for something much bigger. The issue includes a guide at the end that provides terminology and some context about the monsters seen thus far. For example, it explains that diwatas are human-like entities of some sort of divine power who live hidden in the wood, some of which have been further mythologized and worshiped as individual gods. Through this expository information, we get a glimpse that Carmina’s journey culminates in discovering her own inherited connections to the supernatural world to, let alone, to a major Philippine goddess. These small tidbits are approachable enough to service anyone unfamiliar with Filipino mythology.
Although not unique and very similar to art styles used in many other comics, Carmina’s artwork is solid, and the semi-realistic direction works well with the fantastical elements of the story. The heavy use of green and other deeply saturated colors in scenes associated with Carmina’s past and the Philippines contrasts with her everyday reality in the United States. Green is also typically used to represent the paranormal in other media, and here, I think it effectively intertwines imagery of nature and the otherworldly.
The overall set up of Carmina may be very minimal, but this first issue certainly ends on a note that has me anticipating for more. It is hard to not draw comparisons to Trese, the ongoing komiks series by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo that also recently had a Netflix animated adaptation. On the surface, the premises between the two horror works are similar, pitting a female protagonist against Philippine mythological creatures. However, that is where those similarities end, as our current glimpse into Carmina seems to point towards a more grounded character study peppered with paranormal and horror elements compared to Trese’s format being rooted strongly in pulpy detective mysteries.
Carmina also makes it distinctly clear that it is not just a Filipino work, but a Filipino-American work. Through its biracial protagonist, an American with Philippine heritage, and embracing bilingualism in a script that uses both English and Tagalog (with translations), Carmina also hopes to portray an accurate perspective of immigrant culture that draws from the lived experiences of creators’ themselves.
Mark Nazal, writer for Carmina and Creative Director at Diwata, prefaced the issue with an anecdote about his childhood fears of the local threat of manananggal (vampiric-like, flying monsters) in spite of living outside of the Philippines in many different places throughout his life. Musing on his experience as a third culture kid, he “believe[s] that just as we’ve traveled to [the United States], [we have] stories that now have a foothold here in some of the most unexpected places.” Erica Juliet, another one of Diwata’s co-founders, adds on that it is not only important to represent Filipino identity authentically, but to also properly represent mixed-race experiences across the global Filipino community that she too also personally identifies with.
As Carmina is just in its early beginnings, Diwata Komiks hopes to introduce a different world to new readers, drawing from Philippine culture and pre-colonial texts. In Nazal’s own words, he hopes “to tell stories from a culture that [he] thought [he] lost connection to”, reflected in Carmina’s own longing for the answers to her own past.