Profile originally published in LA Alternative Press.
“I love fairies,” Dame Darcy tells me. “Fairies saved my life.”
While the inimitable, award-winning comic books, paintings, TV shows, plays, music, short films and other fictions that Darcy creates are strange indeed, it could be argued that Darcy herself is a lot stranger. That’s no small feat when your comics features characters like Strega Pez, a woman who communicates via written messages on Pez-like tablets that emerge from a bleeding slit in her throat, or Igpay, a cheerfully sinister pig that speaks, appropriately enough, in pig-latin. But Darcy’s own conversation is often sprinkled with little jewels of perfect oddness. There’s that fairy thing, for starters.
“When I first moved to LA a few years ago," Darcy says, "my life was really messed up. I had a junky car and it was super hot and I couldn't understand why everybody was being such a big faker. There was a magnolia bush in my neighborhood where the fairies lived, and I made wishes to them for my life to better, and they granted them. And then one day I went by and saw that the bush had been all chopped up by some gardeners, and I was so upset, because the fairies were all dead. But it was okay, because they’d saved my life.”
Since Fantagraphics Books began publishing Darcy’s comic book ‘Meat Cake’ in 1991, she has blossomed into a funky, one-woman media empire. Her artwork has appeared in small-press ‘zines and major publications; she has recorded a bewildering number of CDs, as a solo artist and with various bands; a play based on her work toured the country; she has her own fashion line (www.offbeatbrands.com); she hosted her own New York public access TV show, ‘Turn of the Century’, tapes of which are now collector’s items; she has acted in independent films and done the occasional modeling gig; she has been a featured oddball on such TV shows as ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Fifth Wheel’. Her fans include Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who called her “the only real true seer I've ever come in contact with,” and Courtney Love, who flew Darcy to Seattle to decorate the room of Francis Bean, the daughter of Love and Kurt Cobain. Darcy has also found time to hand-craft spooky little dolls she sells to fans through her website (www.damedarcy.com), she is a practicing witch and recently she’s been teaching art to inner-city kids. As you read this, she has a new ‘Meat Cake’ collection out, she’s working on an apocalyptic movie script and she occasionally performs around LA.
But the untimely death of her fairy friends is not the only hardship Darcy has endured. She’s had years of health problems and her fiancés are in perpetually sorry shape. She was in New York during the WTC attacks, an experience she’s still working through. She’s lived all over the country, often moving to get away from bad situations. She declines to go into specifics, but apparently she’s had a few really rotten boyfriends. She still travels a lot, sometimes for shows of her art, sometimes to perform as a musician, sometimes to visit friends. Sometimes, it seems, just to keep moving.
“Some people are just born gypsies,” Darcy says. “And some people just have stuff come up in their lives that makes them live like gypsies. That’s more how it’s been for me. Every now and then, things in my life just go crazy. And then it’s time to move on.”
I spent weeks trying to set-up our interview, and while she was unfailingly polite and helpful whenever we spoke, every time we got close to having something scheduled, Darcy would hop on a plane to various exotic locales around the globe (Slovenia, New York) and not return for weeks. When we finally sat down to talk, she was by turns shockingly honest and maddeningly elusive. She would casually mention some fascinating aspect of her life, tell me just enough to get me really intrigued and then abruptly brush the topic aside, giving a different reason every time for why she didn’t care to discuss the matter further.
In the case of discussing her “happy but demented” childhood and the problems that led her to run away from home in her teens, she wanted to protect her family’s privacy. Regarding her belief in witchcraft, she said that somebody important (she didn’t name names) had instructed her not to discuss the details for fear that it could get her branded as a kook and hurt her chances of mainstream success; in the next breath, she told me about a hex she’d put on somebody years ago, how it had worked and gotten the person beaten up, and how the person had pleaded with her later to remove the hex. She told me she doesn’t do hexes like that anymore, that as she’s matured she’s come to believe that retribution is a matter best left to the fates. But as for whether she’s a Satanist or a Wiccan, or if she believes in voodoo? She told me she’s a Catholic, and politely but firmly changed the subject.
Darcy says things that would sound crazy to many people, but she doesn’t sound crazy saying them. Her voice is rather deep and East Coast, nothing like the twittering, Glenda the Good Witch trill I’d imagined before we met, and even her laugh is a little sad. Darcy actually sounded most grounded and content when she was discussing her encounters with the spirit world. When talk turned to the more mundane business of daily life – how she plans to pay this month’s rent with less than 100 bucks in her bank account, for instance – she’d become wistful and fidgety, like a kid stuck in church on a long, hot Sunday.
“Reality,” Dame Darcy told me, “is not my forte.”
I think it’s truer to say that Darcy is sometimes overwhelmed by trying to live in several parallel realities at once. There is the life where she is an internationally acclaimed artist; there is the life where she is a starving young Angeleno who can’t afford to pay her doctor bills, and there is the life where voices speak to her from mulberry bushes. That’s a lot to ask any one mind to cope with, and Darcy certainly seems to do as well with it as anybody could be expected to.
I ask her if she’s ever questioned her own sanity, and she laughs.
“I've certainly been described as crazy a lot,” Darcy says. “Maybe I am. If I am, I don't care. I'd say that seeing fairies is the least of my problems. I don’t see them as much as I'd like. I'd say my dream is to eventually go off into some fairy world were I could listen to Tiny Tim and drink strawberry tea and play with dolls all day long. I want to live with the fairies.”
I hope she stays on this plane of existence for a long while before the fairies take her away. Our mean old world could do with a lot more of her kind of maybe-craziness.
