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He illustrated it--copiously. All of Darger's paintings served this obsessive narrative, beginning with small portraits of imaginary generals and developing into 12-ft.-long scrolls, done in watercolor and collage on joined sheets of paper. Darger had no formal training, and as far as is known he never visited a museum, although there are faint signs that he might have seen reproductions of Gauguin. He made it all up as he went along, according to the dictates of his compulsion. Since he couldn't draw the human body, he traced his muffin heroines and victims from children's books, comic strips and advertisements. He would then give the naked ones tiny penises and sometimes, even more puzzling, horns.
Bizarre obsessions don't make interesting art in themselves, but Darger had genuine talent beyond them, particularly in his power of formal arrangement and his sense of color. At their best, his friezes of androgynous Shirley Temploids hold the long scroll format beautifully, with a fine sense of interval and grouping. With the big, delicate flowers and butterflies alternating with weird, cavernous landscapes, searchlight rays and puffs of rifle smoke, they are like a skewed version of Kate Greenaway's Victorian illustrations. The pale, blooming color is rarely less than inventive, and it can break out into a startling decorative richness--as in Two Spangled Blengins, showing a pair of dragons with striped and polka-dotted wings hovering protectively around a cutout of a little girl.
It would be easy in these prurient days to think of Darger merely as a compulsive old pervert--a sort of Poussin of pedophilia. (One art-historian-cum-psychiatrist opined in the New York Times that "psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer," a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about his character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly; much the same--and on the same evidence--could be said about the authors of the Old Testament.)
It makes more sense to relate his work, in all its extreme, inward-directed fantasies of evil and innocence, to Darger's main lifeline, the Catholic faith. Catholic iconography, as anyone knows who is even briefly exposed to it (and Darger was marinated in its kitsch forms for 70 years), is suffused with Massacres of the Innocents, scenes of the roasting, flaying and disemboweling of idealized martyrs, sinners in hellfire and visions of a countervailing Paradise. Rummaging back through his fantasies for redemption of his own wretchedly maimed childhood, Darger was able to bind up his wounds with his religious fixations. This, in the end, is what gave his art a power that did not exist in his life.