Looking for an old pal, a homeless lesbian stumbles unto an underground city of sapphic women, promptly seduces their queen and in the process foils a military coup. All in a day’s work for Dōlo Rômy
Written and drawn by Karen Platt, The Adventures of Dōlo Rômy in the Underground City of Women came out in 1989 from Dōlo Blue Graphics in Minneapolis, as a black and white, magazine sized 40 pages long book, with cardboard covers. I could discover very little online about either this book or its author, who I don’t think is this Karen Platt. It feels and reads like something that was self published, outside of the regular comics markets. More a book you’d see alongside punk and anarchist zines than in your local comics store’s alternative section. Though I did indeed got it there, as a curiosity, but how they got it I have no clue.
Unlike Dōlo Rômy, Karen Platt herself is featured in the Grand Comics Database, having work listed on Dykes Delight and Dark Horse’s The Mask, of all things. She was apparently also featured in the 2012 Fantagraphics anthology No straight Lines, an overview of queer comix history and the subsequent 2021 documentary that spun off from it.
The story has Rômy finding the underground city of women, look around it for a few pages looking for her old gal pal before deciding to fuck it, have a drink in a night club and hook up with one of the locals. Who tells her the city was founded in 1973 as a new Lesbos, just underground and that there are now 60,000 women living there. Before they can get physical, Rômy is arrested by the police, who take her to the queen who will decide on her fate. Luckily, this turns out to be one of her old flames, they have sex but once again Rômy is interrupted, this time by the coup. She escapes, gets a couple of like minded gals to help her and in the end successfully launches a counter coup and finds her old friend. Who, it turns out, may have inspired the coup because she needed a few dames to provide her with the luxuries in life. All’s well that ends well and Rômy does get to finally enjoy both the first woman she got lucky with as her old pal the queen. A drifter at heart, Rômy and friend leave the underground city at the end of the story to roam the streets of Bush’s America again.
The art is rough, with lots of heavy blacks and zip a tone, which works well for this story. The writing is fun, this is basically a b-movie as even Rômy herself acknowledges, but it moves along with a bit of humour. The sex scenes flow naturally from the story, don’t feel gratuitous, nor that titillating if I’m honest. I’m not sure if there was every anything else of the adventures of Rômy published. The back cover promises she would return in Set a Bad, Bad, Bad Example but I haven’t seen anything about this online. The way this story also feels like it was the sequel to something, but again if it was, I couldn’t find anything about it.
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