Originally posted September 8, 2002. Excerpted from Cinescape online. Click pic for full review.

MEATCAKE emerged, it seems to my unreliable memory, fully formed from creator Dame Darcy’s brow. She herself appears to spring from very brow of Goth, equally fully-formed, her being and our idea of that subculture merging and blurring. That’s not to say that Darcy’s work, or her presentation of herself as a character within the milieu of both Goth and MEATCAKE, are predictable or specifically derivative. It’s more like a sense of recognition: “Of course”, one thinks. “That’s exactly what a goth comic book should be.”

In a larger sense, this is because Darcy is working within the constraints of genre, and when a creator commits to a genre, part of the measure of success is how closely the artists’ work adheres to our expectations of that genre. From this perspective, her work is very successful indeed. However, because MEATCAKE is only a facet of the ongoing project of self-creation and presentation which is Dame Darcy herself, standalone consumers of her comic may miss more normative aspects of comics craft, such as plot and character.