CAT BURGLAR BLACK by Richard Sala (First Second 2009)

What a banner year for Richard Sala--he's completed Delphine, his most ambitiously literary work to date, and for a chaser, he follows that up with Cat Burglar Black, his most mainstream-friendly work to date. Talk about a study in contrasts! Anyone who read the downbeat Delphine and wondered where all of Sala's usual sweet silliness had gone need only look here to find it distilled, concentrated, and congealed into a pop-comic confection. As opposed to Delphine's sepia gloom and claustrophobic detail (made all the more oppressive by the massive Ignatz format), CBB is Sala's first full-length comic bursting with color, and he smooths the jaggeder edges off his style for the most delectable eye-candy he's served up yet.

There are plenty of other ways CBB mainstreams Sala's tendencies. None feel like sellouts or compromises--they just cut right to the heart of what's most broadly and immediately appealing in his comics, and deliver it in an uncluttered, accessible way that damn near anyone should be able to see and appreciate.

With her prematurely grey (actually, white) hair, Dickensian-orphan backstory, and cat burglar talents, K. is a recognizably Sala-esque heroine in the tradition of girl-sleuth Judy Drood and goth-waif Peculia. But K. is much more of an everygirl. Her personality is much more sympathetic and less cartoonily-exaggerated than Judy's. While Peculia's comics have a subtext of sexual awakening, and Sala draws her with a subtle edge hinting at that, he makes K. cute and attractive, but dials the sexy down even further, even in her form-fitting costume of "cat burglar black."

The story, too, is better suited to a mainstream audience than Sala's usual fare. I don't consider myself a stupid or inattentive reader, but in my review of Chuckling Whatsit, I said,

The plots and schemes are so numerous and densely overlapping, my first reading was an exercise in bewilderment. That was all right--I just plugged on, and if I didn't understand all the insanity, I nevertheless enjoyed it immensely. On the second reading, I think I was better able to keep track of who was on what side(s), pursuing which agenda(s). There are multiple MacGuffins in play, some of which don't even exist.

Now, the television series Leverage is less demanding by a whole order of magnitude, and yet creator John Rogers has said of it, "Testing indicates -- and I'm not kidding -- that about 30% of our audience never understands the con at all." In CBB, Sala reaches out to this kind of broader audience by stripping the mystery down to a few favorite, defining tropes, and presenting them in a much more linear fashion, marking the beats with an easy-to-follow "plot coupon" structure of three paintings to be stolen in succession. It still has Sala's fingerprints all over it--a goofily-named secret society, a demented serial killer, preposterous death-traps, secret doorways, etc.--it's just that these elements are laid out in a straightforward, mainstream-friendly way.

I haven't mentioned it yet, but this is actually a Young Adult graphic novel, and as Megan Lee notes at Squiggly Lines, the violence is toned down accordingly:

Only this seems a bit more tame than his last few things. . . . In Cat Burglar Black the gruesome deaths are only shown in their begining stages, so you see the cat suit being gnawed off a poor hapless girls toes by vicious pirhannas, or the twang as a statue fires its arrow into another girl's heart. And what Sala book would be complete without a never-caught serial killer on the loose? But that girl is only drug off and her fate is left to the imagination.

In short, this strikes me as a wonderful gateway to Sala's comics, especially for young readers (for that matter, it wouldn't make a bad gateway to comics, period). Longtime fans should absolutely snap it up as well. It's jam-packed with all the stuff that makes his comics quirky and fun, and I think even black-and-white snobs will find plenty to admire in his watercolors.