Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale #3 // Review
Maddie say s that there’s an unexplainable pleasure in tearing your life apart with you own hands. So why does she want to let someone else kill her? (That;s what she;s been thinknig about lately.) She’s been thinking about that guy she knows online. That stranger who wants to kill her. And he wants to let her do it. Things continue to spiral into darkness in Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale #3 Writer/artist Luana Vecchio continues a deep dive into the shadowy end of sexual awakening in an issue that begins to find the darkly beating heart at the center of the drama.
Maddie is trying to manage her own transformation. She might even be alive at the end of it all. She’s not sure whether or not she wants to live. That’s going to become an issue for her as things progress and she tries to avoid her parents....or maybe just get them to understand on some level. Maybe she just wants SOMEONE to understand. More than anything she needs a certain amount of privacy, but here are stalkers comnig to her door in pig masks and maybe it’s just the one person, but maybe it’s more than that. She’s carrying around a knife these days. (Or maybe she’s just thinking about doing that.) Anything could happen.
Vecchio has been very delicate and cautious with Maddie’s descent into hell. It’s been a hell of a journey so far...but a familiar one. Maddie is moving into depression and darkness that is all too familiar for so many people trying to survive high school. She’s very much alone and trying to understand her own desires while being bathed in the sinister light of attention that doesn’t wan to know her as much as it wants to know her body.
Vecchio’s art rolls through a series of fragmented close-ups. There’s a real dedication to ensuring that the action never hits the page head-on. It’s always to the side and off-center as the story moves throguh its often gruesome look at the darker side of human desire. That lack of centered and central focus on the action is a central character in and of itself. Vecchio could tell the same exact story with the same exact art and deliver all of the drama in simple, straight-ahead framing and it would be a completely different comic book.
Vecchio’s off-center framing of the action seems to be diving straight into Maddie. She’s uncomfortable looking at anything directly, so she’s always viewing it all out of the corner of her eye whether it’s totally inncouous or gut-wrenchingly disgusting or dangerous. It’s all the same for he on so many levels and the none of it is anything that she can look at directly. Vecchio’s approach to the art with respect to this is one of the most engaging aspects of the whole series thus far. It’s not just a presentation of life on the edge of adulthood...it’s something quite a bit more than that.
