Doll Parts by Luana Vecchio

It was October 2022 when the first issue of Lovesick would hit the shelves, italian artist Luana Vecchio’s first long winded original story. Before then she was on a drawing assignment for Bolero with writer Wyatt Kennedy, Gospel for a New Century for the Image! 30th anniversary anthology,  has had a piece in Millarworld Annual 2017 and also Something for your M.I.N.D, a short story found in Heavy Metal issue 308. 

This is to show she already had a steady track record before her hit series. But things would take a sharper turn with Lovesick. For the past few years, she has done a great deal of conventions, sold original art, drew variant covers for mainstream series along with underground, crowdfunded publications. She has kept herself incredibly busy.

Lovesick would close after seven issues in July 2023 and would leave a permanent mark on its readership. In it, we made the acquaintance of Domino, an heartless autassassinophiliac dominatrix. People were on the lookout for Vecchio’s next big project and here it is!

From December 2024 to March 2025, readers enjoyed Doll Parts, a prequel to Lovesick. How are monsters made? Who’s to blame for their creation? Should we feel sympathetic towards them? Those are some of the questions asked in this four chapter series.

Madeleine, or Mad for short, is a soon-to-be teenage ballet dancer. She’s not just a loner, it seems as if her life is on standby. She’s shackled by her mom’s authority. There’s no perspective for someone of her standing and nobody is truly looking out for her. It’s as if she’s a burden and an inconvenience to some, a tool to others. 

Here and there, yet, glimpses of individuals willing to lend a hand if they’re asked to, like Daisy and her mom. In fact, someone as bubbly and as confident as Daisy’s mom is exactly what Mad would like to become, someone who could both confront her own mom and disappoint her greatly. 

In all this turmoil, she’s met with a stranger that sexually scars her and, eventually, finds a dead body on the side of the road on her way back home. But since she’s taught to be scared of the world, scared to shake away the pillars of banality, scared to face the monsters roaming in broad daylight, she stays put. It’s better to keep a low profile and keep appearances as they are, since there are no other alternatives at the moment. But when will there be?

Adam, a small boy enamoured with Mad, will introduce her to this desperate alternative: a dark web snuff site. What first began as morbid curiosity slowly turns into a channel for self-destruction, rebirth even. In seeing others utterly destroyed, it’s not hard to picture ourselves in the same position. For some, this might even be sexually enticing. Thanatos, the pulse of death. 

Mad is quickly stalked by a serial killer, who often takes the appearance of the pigmen we saw in Lovesick. Once they learn Mad is a young teen, they stop viewing her as an equal and start treating her like a disposable meat bag. For better or worse, chance encounters with Kris, Adam’s older brother and a renown deflowerer, save her skin quite a few times. 

Her world is gradually stained by her stalker, tension is at its maximum point. In a fit of rage, Mad obliterates her plushie collection. She’s done being afraid. And then begins a quest to dismantle Mad, make room for something else. First, she starts carrying a knife around wherever she goes and isn’t afraid to make it flash. Second, she responds to her stalker, ultimately refusing to take the role of the helpless victim. Third, she uses Kris for her sexual needs, which also puts a permanent dent in her friendship with Adam, who begins to resent her. 

Though Mad was making strides, it all stops short when her mom scolds her. It’s impressively tough to talk back to your loved ones, even when they so deeply hate you. Years later, although Mad has radically changed, jaded and dangerous and she may be, there’s still one obstacle on her path to rebirth (or death): her own mom. 

Mad would grow to become a frequent contributor to the dark web forums and have somewhat of a following. She would plainly say who she was, what school she went to, where her house was. Online users would call bullshit on that. Oh, if they knew! 

What would plunge Mad even deeper is quite surprising. It’s not some sort of gorefest. She meets Daisy at a library. Daisy is now doing her university exam and is doing quite well. What does Mad have for herself? She’s still afraid of the world, deep within her gut. But she’s not Daisy, she never will be, she never even had a chance to be. 

Mad then does a tour d’horizon to dismantle the last parts of her past identity. She has sex with Kris one last time, does a final photoshoot for an online fan, visits her stalker’s grave and then goes to the same highway terrain where she first saw a dead body all those years ago. She strips naked and lays in the grass. Mad is now dead, where she should have been left. 

Doll Parts is the story of someone who's not given any chance to be anything else than the monster. This is what society wants her to be, what it needs her to be. As it was explored earlier on, Mad is a tool to others. To Adam, she’s a potential girlfriend. To Kris, she’s another girl to score. To her stalker, who was no more than a decent stranger until she revealed she actually was a genuine girl, she’s a prey to savour. Only Daisy and her mom view her as an actual human being, with her very own worth. Unfortunately, they are too wrapped in their own lives to care too much about Mad’s direction in life. 

There is no one to get back at in Doll Parts, everyone gets what they deserved in just measurement. And when injustice is decried, denouncers are met with opposition or worse, deafening silence. 

This is what happens when Mad tries to speak her mind on different occasions, such as when she discusses her sexual encounter with a stranger that was jerking it in his van to Adam. But Adam didn’t care, sharing these sordid websites with Mad was just a way to get intimate with her. Her thoughts didn’t matter in that equation.

When Mad confronts her mom about what she’s going through, her mom scolds her and blames her for what she’s living through. She’s so attached to her prude principles and smooth christian image that not even her own daughter’s misery could shake them. 

I feel it would be appropriate at this point to touch a few words on the connecting variants for this series. Each virgin variant, entirely drawn by Veechio, encapsulates the story incredibly well.

In the first cover, Mad is in her ballerina outfit dancing gracefully, surrounded by candies and teddy bears. Three skeletons are also dancing with her. Though she’s just a little girl, things are not quite right and death is looming. There is a serial killer going for little girls and those skeletons might be theirs. It also might be Mad’s, eventually. 

In the second cover, several giant plush pigs are salivating over Mad. The teddy bears are now clawed and ready to attack. Mad is leaning on her drawings, seemingly unaffected by the anxiogenic atmosphere. The stalker, the boys, her mom, they’re all coming for her and she will soon have to choose: stand up or cave.

In the third cover, the plush army has been seriously damaged by Mad’s knife. She’s strapped with bandages, some wounds probably self-inflicted. The scene is still crowded, since the fight continues. Her wings are stitched, the invaders are severely wounded, but Mad is still surviving.

In the fourth and final cover, Domino vanquished the plush army with a chainsaw. The scene is decluttered and Domino is the victor, having destroyed Mad. Her chainsaw is a pig, a recurrent emblem of the series. The teddy bears are disemboweled and Domino dons black wings instead of Mad’s white wings. She’s the monster now. 

All pictures belong to Image comics, this is intended for review only pls no sue :)