We’ve all met people with cool jobs we’d like to have. But have you ever run into someone who has pretty much every job you’ve ever wanted to have? Understand, then, reader, my extreme envy for Dame Darcy, the Los Angeles-based comics artist, filmmaker, publisher, touring musician, fashion and interior designer, dollmaker and teacher (in no particular order) who is showing original work from her 2008 graphic novel, “Gasoline,” at Civilian Art Projects in the Penn Quarter through Feb. 7. (For the record, I’ve never wanted to be a dollmaker or an interior designer.)
Darcy started her offbeat comics series “Meat Cake” in 1989, while she was still a teenager attending the San Francisco Art Institute on scholarship. The respected independent publisher Fantagraphics picked up “Meat Cake” in 1992, after Darcy moved to New York, finding work with outlets from The Village Voice to the Cartoon Network. She continued to publish her black-and-white series of Victorian-flavored fairy tales sporadically, while teaching cartooning and self-publishing at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and performing music with the likes of Sonic Youth and the John Spencer Blues explosion. Her current musical outlet is the goth band Death by Doll, wherein Darcy sings and plays bass. The group has released a CD of original songs, also titled “Gasoline,” to accompany the book. Darcy also plans a feature film adaptation, to be a hybrid of live action and animation.
“Gasoline” the book was six years in the making, the culmination of an ascending curve of ambition and sophistication in Darcy’s comics work, which also includes the prior graphic novels “Frightful Fairytales” and “The Illustrated ‘Jane Eyre.’” Released last fall, “Gasoline,” is a sort of sunnier take on the apocalyptic future depicted in the seminal 1982 science fiction movie “The Road Warrior.” Except with witches. And, um, nihilists. (You kind of have to read it for it to make sense. But come on, how insane do you sound trying to summarize a Harry Potter novel for somebody who’s never read one?)
Work from “Gasoline” is displayed in their narrative sequence at Civilian, giving you a sense of the humor and mystery of its story. Darcy’s work has always been a feast for the eyes, a near-hallucinatory marriage of oddly matched styles and techniques: expressionism, newspaper cartooning, etching, fine art illustration. To see her images — colorful and inviting, but shot through with the faint flicker of menace — framed and displayed at nearly double the size of the comics page is a rare treat.
If you go
“Dame Darcy: GASOLINE”: Musician and “Meat Cake” cartoonist Dame Darcy shows original drawings from the 2008 graphic novel “Gasoline.”
Where: Civilian Art Projects, 406 7th St. NW, 3rd Floor
When: Through Feb. 7
Info: Free
