MEAT CAKE #16

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
CARTOONIST: Dame Darcy
32 pp., B&W, $3.95

Another issue of Dame Darcy’s comic book series, Meat Cake, appeared late last year.  Meat Cake #16 contains the usual eclectic mix of short stories and short pieces.  Richard Dirt and friends find a premature infant fairy cat in “Nails.”  Later Richard and friends enter an old house and find haunted portraits; the ghosts inside the pictures want to return to the world of the living even if it means replacing someone living.

Darcy illustrates the ballad “Cold Blows the Wind” in her scratchy, faux copper plate style, a story about a young woman’s devotion to her lover’s grave.  In “Secret Language of Flowers,” Darcy personifies the character of flowers as young women with a particular trait.  [For instance, the “apple thorn” is personified by a wavy-haired vixen with “deceitful charms.”]  Sailors get the erotic treatment in “The Boys of Summer,” and Darcy illustrates love “Spells.”

If Melinda Gebbie jammed with Richard Sala, then, the result might be this Trina Robbins/Ed Gorey-ish collection of peculiar comix odds and ends.  Magic, myth, autobiography, and lyrics meets in such an unusual way that makes it hard to describe Dame Darcy’s comix.  Gothic, Victorian, and weird Charles Addams might do, but regardless, Meat Cake continues to be a beautiful comic book series that I refuse to miss.

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