Paper Dolls

Dame Darcy is a performance artist, musician, and writer best known
for Meatcake, a long-running comic published by Fantagraphics that
looks and reads as though drawn by a lonely, dreamy middle school girl,
(albeit one whose scribblings would give pause to any school
counselor).

In Meatcake, information is conveyed primarily through
Darcy’s drawings of big-eyed, long-lashed women and fey, feminized men.
Words are scribbled into thought bubbles and captions, but it’s the
deceptively childlike illustrations that give the comic its appeal. Her
new book, Gasoline, is essentially an illustrated novel:
Drawings accompany the text, but they’re not integral to the story,
pushing Dame Darcy’s prose into the spotlight in a way that
Meatcake does not–and unfortunately, the writing simply
isn’t sophisticated enough to take center stage.

Gasoline is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which
gasoline is scarce and Southern California is overrun by hordes of
roving nihilists. The people of Karoi have banded together against the
nihilists under the spiritual leadership of Amity Armbuster and her
family, who own the only working car in the world, and periodically
must leave the safety of their compound to raid abandoned gas stations
for fuel.

Darcy’s blocky prose evokes nothing more than a child playing with
her dolls. She takes an obvious delight in dressing up her characters,
describing in detail the outfit Amity dons to lead a religious ritual:
“Diamonds glittered at her throat and wound around her wrists in
identical bracelets. Also around her wrist clattered a silver
tambourine, and encircling her waist was a leather strap from which
hung her long, thin, sharp silver sword and sheath.” When it comes time
to make her characters walk and talk, though, she clumsily manipulates
them through half-conceived, poorly evoked scenarios. Here’s the ritual
itself: “The power of a million white lightening bolts ran through
Amity’s body and out of her hair and fingertips. She screamed in a
high-pitched shriek and shook her tambourine. Blood was smeared around
her mouth and stained her gown. ‘Release the bats!’ she shrilled.
‘Release the bats!'” Darcy should stick with drawing:
Gasoline‘s illustrations convey far more, and more effectively,
than the writing does.