November 18, 2003
MEATCAKE
Written and Drawn by Dame Darcy
Published by Fantagraphics Books
I’m stumped. What to make of this book? Not to mention that I wasn’t sure at first if Dame Darcy was actually a woman. But I digress…
MEATCAKE is a collection of the first seven issues of Dame Darcy’s unusual brand of retro-Victorian cartooning. Each issue contains several stories, some brief and some long, and few have any sort of linear continuity as far as character goes. There is a smattering of recurring characters that show up in the book, but for the most part, their stories were the least interesting bits that the good Dame produced.
Dame Darcy is a mega-hyphenate: she sings, acts, tells fortunes, makes dolls, and draws comics. (When does she go potty?) Two things about her jumped out at me immediately;
one, she’s worked with Lisa Carver, so that gave her an immediate marker in my head: I adore Lisa Carver to pieces. Two, the collected edition of MEATCAKE contains an introduction by Margaret Cho, of whom I am also a big fan. So I was predisposed to love MEATCAKE.
But it wasn’t exactly love that I found.
Certain stories in this volume are amazing bits of work. “For Whom The Bell Tolls” is a nearly perfect example of Gothic horror. “Ghost Filly” is wonderfully executed. “Bronwyn and Alifair” is a stunning and powerful little slice of Gothic genius. There’s some other fine work I won’t get into, but Darcy (at times) shows a real flair for finding the right tone and tenor for her stories, and you have to admire it. Her art, when she’s really putting it all together has that rough Goth edge, but it still tells the story well and gets you involved.
Other times, however, particularly when she does stories that involve her recurring cast, such as Stregapez, Scampi The Shellfish, Richard Dirt and others, the book is a bit of a mess. Those stories seem aimless and wandering, and I wasn’t even sure half the time if Dame Darcy had a real story in mind or if she was just being weird for the exercise of it and to fill space in her pages. Her art and lettering also tend to suffer in those stories, and a couple were almost unreadable.
Perhaps the most interesting observation I can make about the collected MEATCAKE is that you rarely see a book that shows the highest highs and the lowest lows that an artist of any kind can reach. Normally, you just get the highs and the lows get ignored. So I find it somewhat…brave that Dame Darcy went forth with a full collection of her work, rather than whitewash out some of the lesser material.
Credit must also be given, however, to Fantagraphics for the nice job of production on the volume. The aforementioned introduction by Margaret Cho is nice in and of itself, but the art direction on the interiors, as well as the cover and paper stock, are superior in nature. You aren’t spending money on a poor looking book when you buy MEATCAKE.
MEATCAKE will find its most potential readers in the Goth and Punk crowds. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, as someone who ran a little bit in that direction a (cough/hack) decade ago, I can see how I might have enjoyed it more back then. Still, there are recommendable stories to be read in this volume, and I can’t dislike it completely. I’d have just liked to see a more consistent effort on the Dame’s part. In 1993, MEATCAKE would have gotten an “A” from me. Today, for older or for worse, it gets a grade of B-.
Should It Be A Movie?
Umm…no.
This book could produce a couple of really fucked up cartoon shorts, but even then, not really. The Dame will just have to expand her coolness into other media forms the way she’s already doing; singing, dancing, acting.
Also Reviewed:
ARTBABE/LA PERDIDA
Written and Drawn by Jessica Abel
Published by Fantagraphics Books
Jessica Abel is one of those talents who is perpetually deserving of wider recognition. ARTBABE has gone on hiatus while Jessica works on LA PERDIDA, but if you can get your hands on the ARTBABE issues or a trade paperback, I highly recommend it. Abel has a gift for fleshing out human stories about very real women and their lives. I found myself easily getting lost in the worlds and settings where she placed her characters, and they came alive for me in ways that few comic characters have done. There’s no sense of the fantastic, such as you’d find in a superhero comic; instead, you get a sense of the fantastic from wanting to know the people on the page beyond the end of Abel’s stories.
LA PERDIDA has gone in a different direction. Abel’s first lengthy sequential work, it’s a semi-autobiographical tale about an American woman who moves from the U.S. to Mexico City as Abel herself did. It’s interesting and done well, but I found less enthusiasm for it, partially because her main character, Carla, is almost completely unsympathetic. That’s a risky artistic choice, considering she’s an analogue for the artist. I trusted the storyteller a lot more than I trusted the story while reading LA PERDIDA, which is not the way it should usually work. Still, I have confidence that Abel will bring the story to an interesting and fulfilling close, even if I don’t like Carla. She’s just that good. And as wretched as most “women’s entertainment” is these days, we need more Jessica Abels working to get stories in the marketplace.
Send review materials to: Marc Mason, 1756 S. College Ave, Tempe, AZ 85281. E-mails can be sent to the address below. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and thanks for reading!
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