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Dame Darcy's Meat Cake #14

By Leroy Douresseaux
June 6, 2005 - 09:00

Fantagraphics recently published the fourteenth issue of Dame Darcy’s exceptional comic book series, MEAT CAKE, and anyone who reads it must realize that there is, up to this point, a large untapped audience for Darcy’s comics, which mix, among other things, black and white Victorian art, woodblock etchings, Goth, Charles Addams, and Darcy’s interests in witchcraft and fairy tales. This issue offers the usual sampling of Darcy goodies – a big old bag of diversity that is waiting for people who don’t read comics, but would love this feast of fanciful darkness.

What sets Darcy apart from mainstream comic book writers and most indie cartoonists is that her flights of imagination don’t just take her to other worlds, it also a journey in which Darcy hunts for all the varied sensations and flavors in her own world. For instance, her “History of Rock Star Witches” are micro-biographies of figures who were so celebrated during their times that to call them celebrities would be a massive understatement. Part “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and drawn using familiar comic book iconography, these histories could only be told through drawings and could only exist as comics created by the hand of Darcy.

Her art takes some getting used to; in fact, it took me a while to warm to Darcy’s cartoons, which mix caricature, abstraction, expressionism, and realism with art deco and early 20th century newspaper cartooning. In one way, the art exists separately from the text, but in another way, the art embellishes the text to create a kind of cartooning in which it is obvious where text and art separate and, then not so obvious. This is why her work makes the reader both think and feel, and do both simultaneously.

Ultimately, regardless of how one interprets Darcy’s work, there is no denying that it is both unusual and captivating. Meat Cake is one of the few comic series in which I feel very sad whenever I finish an issue because I so desperately want more. A

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12