Let Them Meatcake!

Of course you know the gorgeous collection of Dame Darcy's Meatcake comics has been out from Fantagraphics since July, and you're merely waiting for a slight break in the budget to snag a copy of your own, right? It's only $23, after all, but considering the way this economy has been going (ie, down the crapper), you have to not buy it for another month, right?

That's okay, that's cool: It can wait. There's no sell-by date on this excellent compilation of sequential art by one of the medium's most charming practitioners. It can wait, yes, because July isn't so far back ~ especially when you consider how Darcy's fine-line drawings and the narratives they embody seem transported from some fevered girl-imagination from way back in the 1800s.

Here are twisted Victorian tales of death and sex and yearning and witchcraft and sibling rivalries, featuring the fierce characters of Friend the Girl, Effluvia (a mermaid), the conjoined twins Hindrance and Perfidia, the blonde temptress Richard Dirt, Wax Wolf (a zombie manwolf), Strega Pez (who communicates via the imprinted Pez-like tablets that exude from her perpetually slit throat), and others that you, of course, remember from the single-issue comics that Fantagraphics has been publishing since 1993, yes?

Wait. No? You've yet to meet this intricately limned cast of weirdlings? You know of Dame Darcy only because of that Illustrated Jane Eyre she did for Penguin in 2006? Well, ye gods and little fishes, friend, now's the time for further discovery! Hie yourself to Damedarcyland quicker'n you can say "Byronic hero" and enjoy many lazy afternoons within a world conjured by she who seems like the secret inkstained daughter of Edward Gorey and Tony Millionaire.