If time machines existed, says Los Angeles-based artist and provacateur Dame Darcy, she’d be back in the Victorian era in a flash. In this day and age, she says, “I’m a specialty item.”
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Best known for her 12-year-old comic, Meat Cake–in which she heaps melodramatic quantities of violence, romance, and supernatural confrontation on cads, cards, princesses, waifs, wenches, and helpless animals–and her frilly, morbid illustrations for magazines and record labels, Darcy also handcrafts tiny ceramic dolls with real hair, plays the singing saw and banjo, reads palms, and acts in silent films. Last Halloween, Ten Speed Press published her first book, Frightful Fairytales, a collection of spooky, wicked yarns set in a glamorous fictional amalgam of the Elizabethan, Victorian, and Jazz ages.
But though all her comics contain more than a speck of cruelty–a mermaid traps men in ice, a man stabs his lover, a little girl falls down a well–in the end adversity is always overcome. The protagonist marries or acquires a windfall, and, by living life well, gets revenge on her tormentors. Darcy says that the more she realizes that money controls the world, and that her lack of an “adult-style income” restricts her to a hand-to-mouth existence, the less sure she feels that love can conquer all. But through her art, she says, “I’m hoping to learn to believe it does.”
