Review by Frank Plowright

Kim Reaper is puzzling. There’s a strong original idea of an apprentice grim reaper, at first only permitted to collect the souls of dead animals while still under assessment. Also good is Sarah Graley’s expressive cartooning, the pages packed with a lively well designed cast. Where things fall down, though is with seat of the pants plotting where switches from scene to scene are dictated by random behaviour, while emotional responses are all over the place. Yes, Kim Reaper is intended as a comedy, but even comedy needs some logical underpinnings.

Grim Beginnings starts with Becka crushing on Kim from a distance and deciding to invite her out for a drink. Following her from class, she sees Kim pull a scythe from her bag and open up a transportation portal. More than a little on the public side, but let’s chalk that down to comedy convenience. Becka follows Kim through, surprises her, learns about her job, starts babbling, and complications ensue. They’re deliberately silly. After being surprised Kim warms to Becka, but several pages later Becka has reconsidered her crush, not on the basis of Kim collecting the souls of the dead, but that she’s a risk taker. That irrationality from the person who jumped through a portal to an unknown destination is used to set up the conflict for the next sequence.

The charm of the cartooning rapidly diminishes when Kim, Becka and others just behave in a way that serves the plot, and what follows is something completely random that Graley feels like drawing. The silliness would work fine over a few pages, but the lack of viable plot doesn’t make for a readable graphic novel, which is a shame as Graley the artist is talented.

Many readers obviously felt differently as Kim and Becka return in Vampire Island.