THE WORLD OF RICHARD SALA

Full Disclosure: I first learned of Richard Sala when he kindly offered to put a bug in someone's ear at Fantagraphics, his publisher, concerning the Groovy Age of Horror book project I've mentioned on occasion. When I looked him up on Amazon and expressed an interest in checking out his work, he provided the generous batch of comics I'll be reviewing here.

Really, I'm glad Richard brought himself to my attention, because it's about damn time someone did. I devoured everything he sent me as quickly as I could, and the more I read, the more dismayed I was that I hadn't heard of him before. By all rights, I should be a fan of longstanding. Well, here's passing the favor on! If you haven't heard of Sala yet, you're going to now, and if you dig the stuff covered here at Groovy Age, you owe it to yourself to check out his comics. I'll take the liberty of saying, "You're welcome," in advance.


There's something very precise and consistent about his approach to story and art that's easy to recognize but not so easy to describe. It's basically the unholy spawn of hardboiled pulp noir and gothic horror, with creepy family resemblances to a lot of other stuff, ranging from European arch-villain serials to teen sleuth series to Dick Tracy comic strips to the macabre cartoons of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams to Krimis and gialli . . .

Actually, it's all of that and more, as viewed in a funhouse mirror. There's a dark, strong, yet elusive undercurrent of something that might be humor, or might be something more disturbing. It elicits laughter, or at least a ghoulish grin, but is it really funny? By the time I turned the page, I was never quite so sure.


The Fantomas-esque Mr. Ixnay, one of several arch-villains lurking in the pages of The Chuckling Whatsit, is a perfect example. Mr. Nix would be a natural, if rote, name for an arch-villain; Sala gives it a pig-latin twist . . . to what purpose? Humor, camp, or parody would be the easy answers, but there's more to it than that. The childish delight we might take in the silly sound transports us unawares to more primitive regions of the psyche.


Mad Night and The Grave Robber's Daughter are both "Judy Drood, Girl Detective" adventures, and I'd recommend them together as the best, most definitive gateway into Sala's work. If Nancy Drew is a wholesome girl sleuth, Judy Drood is a hard-cussing, fist throwing, breaking and entering, incorrigible snoop. She's pathologically paranoid, no matter how extravagantly evil the conspiracies (always plural) around her really are. Kasper Keene is her hapless, probably virginal, vested-and-bespectacled sidekick.


In Mad Night, they contend with no fewer than three masked arch-villains, as well as other grotesqueries like Mr. Phleming Lungwort (he looks--and sounds!--even worse than that sounds), and a malevolent hand puppet with a delectable bevy of pirate girls at its command. Forget baroque; the mischief here is positively rococo. If you find it impossible to keep track of, I believe it's meant to be disorienting (a lot of what I've said about gialli would apply--not least because of the Blood and Black Lace homage, evident on the cover).


Grave Robber's Daughter is more of a Judy solo story (just a cameo for Kasper), and is simply clown horror at its most supernaturally delirious, suffused with an Edward Gorey mood of mystery. It's also a significant transition from Judy's Beetle Bailey #$&*-style swearing to a full-on F-carpet-bombing. The first four words of the story and out of her mouth are literally "Fuck!", and that pretty much sets the tone. Sala goes full-throttle on the violence and gore here, too. As a testimony to how absorbing this is, I happened to have it with me when I met some friends for drinks; it caught someone's eye, and the whole rest of the time, one or another of them were poring over it--I shit you not--cover to cover.


I'll be reviewing more of Sala's work in Pt. 2, and then Pt. 3 will be an interview with da man--stay tuned!! In the meantime, why not take a spin around his site, where he's got a cool animation or two! Speaking of animation, he's the guy behind MTV's Liquid Television series Invisible Hands. Oh, what the hell, here it is--watch and enjoy!