The Meat Cake Bible

Book excerpt: Dame Darcy is one of the sui generis artistic talents of the past two decades ― musician, actress, fortune teller, dollmaker, Gen X/feminist icon, and last but not least, cartoonist to the core ― and has been bewitching readers for over 20 years with her neo-Victorian horror/humor/romance comic Meat Cake. Alternating between one-off (often cruelly tragic) fairy tales and ongoing romps starring her eclectic cast of characters, including Effluvia the Mermaid, the roguish roué Wax Wolf, Igpay the Pig-Latin pig, Stregapez (a women who speaks by dispensing Pez-like tablets through a bloody hole in her throat), the mischievous Siamese twins Hindrance and Perfidia, Scampi the Selfish Shellfish, the stalwart Friend the Girl, and the blonde bombshell Richard Dirt, all delineated in her inimitable luxurious scrawl, Meat Cake is like a peek into the most creative, deranged dollhouse you ever saw. The Meat Cake Bible is the definitive collection of the series, collecting every story from all 17 issues (1993-2008) ― including “Hungry Is the Heart,” Darcy’s legendary collaboration with Alan Moore ― as well as new stories from the unpublished 18th issue.