Review by Win Wiacek
Darcy Megan Stanger is a prolific and restless artist, musician, animator, dollmaker, interior designer, fashion model, art teacher and reality TV star – one of those ever-so-likable, infuriating do-it-alls modern society is increasingly populated by. Since 1993 as Dame Darcy she has been building a weird, wistful and gothically girlish fantasy universe over several projects, and this affordable black and white paperback reprints the best moody marvels for your appreciation.
For some her darkly comic, magic-infested, mock-Victorian realm of slender, ethereal, hauntingly lovely gamins and ghastly side-show freaks might be a step too far. This is a stark place with no room for dull, fat people or the plain visaged.
Certainly this collection is best read in measured instalments, lest the girly-girl blend of Edwardian emo-fashion, Jazz-age make up, tragic love-stories, sinister childhoods, ghostly interventions, maids behaving badly and fractured fairy-tale moral instruction lose its power to affect. However, the sensibilities of modern female characters thriving in a gloomy imaginative otherplace are rich with entertainment potential especially when scripted with the deliciously scandalous wit of la Dama.
Although some few non-related snippets are included, the major portion of the book concerns the tribulations of a rather distinctive cast of self-absorbed, grotesque and genteel ladies of varied means and character. There’s shrinking violet Friend The Girl, the abrasive Richard Dirt, the constantly bickering conjoined twins Hindrance and Perfidia, and seductive, bitchy mermaid Effluvia. Strega Pez communicates through a livid gash in her throat, Scampi the Shellfish is a talkative crustacean, there’s utterly bonkers wise woman Granny Igpay and undead, monstrous token male Wax Wolf, all living in a world at once similar and wondrously ancient and removed.
In sultry, sinister or just plain strange short tales the extended eccentric cast live their odd and abstracted lives for us whilst in longer fables Darcy demonstrates her love and tacit understanding of classical storytelling and particularly Gothic Romance fantasies.
Amidst the assorted unaligned graphical gags and oddments are such brief gems as a homage to cartoon pioneer Gustave Verbeek and his upside-down strips, and an acerbic assemblage of actively skewed Old Nursery Rhymes as well as some decidedly quirky autobiographical incidents. The absolute show-stealer is Darcy’s baroque, wilfully whimsical satire-fest with Alan Moore who scripts the marvellously captivating ‘Hungry is the Heart’: a spectacular expose of the extraordinary life and times of turn of the century Society Maverick, Wild-Woman and Button Magnate Wellington Woolenboy AKA Jumbalor – “Damp String Woman”.
Macabre, hilarious and addictively odd, Meat Cake satisfies appetites you can’t believe you have. This is a book for girls that every comicbook guy really needs to see. In 2016 Fantagraphics reissued this in hardcover as Meat Cake Bible, along with material prepared for a never-published comic.
