by Jared Gardner

I can only assume Richard Sala is a marketer’s nightmare. Combining gothic (and often ultra-violent) stories with camp humor, teenage detectives, foul language, and a Hanna-Barbera sense of characterization, Sala has never exactly found his niche. And that is part of the pleasure of reading his stories, which draw as much from Scooby Doo and 1940s serials as they do from any comics influence one could name. Indeed, the last influence is probably the clearest. Reading Sala’s best stories, such as the blissful and obscene Chuckling Whatsit (1997), is like watching a grade-Z serial directed by Orson Welles and edited by a midwestern teenage meth addict. The framing is gorgeous, the art direction impeccable, but the editing is often completely mad—jumping from setting to setting, protagonist to protagonist, brutal mutilation to brutal mutilation. Eventually our hopped-up editor wins, as is only right, and the reader becomes so caught up in the completely frenetic energy of the story that he (and I choose my pronouns advisedly here) gets over both the inevitable qualms at Sala’s appetites for the slow evisceration of half-clad teenage girls and the equally sizeable reservations regarding the plotting, which has long since abandoned obedience to the laws of gravity or gravitas.

The Chuckling Whatsit is truly the best book with which to introduce a new reader to Sala’s unique style (dare I say “vision”?). But my own personal favorite is his more recent adventure (also published by Fantagraphics), Mad Night, which features Sala’s best heroine, the indomitable and foul-mouthed girl-detective named Judy Drood, along with a cast of devilish goons and goblins (many of whom are university faculty, as is only appropriate), and of course a hand-puppet mastermind commanding an army of brainwashed pirate-vixens. Together these two volumes represent the best of Sala’s work. But they also represent the dilemma he poses when trying to figure out how to get his work out to a broader audience. The adult “graphic novel” audience is likely to find his work, well, not nearly sufficiently snooty and introspective. And the superhero crowd will most certainly dismiss the work out of hand for its Raw-inspired expressionist style. But there is a fast-growing market of comics directed at young adult readers—especially girls—with gothic themes and feisty heroines. Could this be the solution?

I fear these were the questions going through someone’s head when the decision was made to publish Sala’s new short work, The Grave Robber’s Daughter, in a Scholastic-sized format, featuring some ghoulish clowns and the titular young daughter on the cover. And in truth, compared to other Sala work, this one is almost “appropriate” (my son’s least favorite word) for younger readers, once one gets past the “fuck fuck fuck” with which Judy Drood opens this newest adventure. But this book lacks more than simply the topless girl pirates and sadistic torturing of young girl flesh. It also lacks the energy, the complexity, the and the meth-fuelled editing that made his other works so fun to read. Without them…well it might be a bit more PG-13, but there is not much left worth reading. Sala himself seems to have been less than inspired here, to judge by the artwork, which is crude and sketchy at times and displays little of the detail and texture of his earlier Drood story. But it also loses all the crazy tangential characters, reducing the plotting to a fairly limp Twilight Zone episode with a completely uninspired conclusion. If this was the attempt to market Sala to young readers, I might recommend other titles and allow Sala to return to writing for the pervs and ADD-Goths who have enjoyed his peculiar work for so many years.

Fortunately, almost simultaneous with the publication of The Grave Robber’s Daughter, Fantagraphics published in its Ignatz comicbook series the first installment of Delphine, which is a much more appropriate way to present Sala to the world (for readers of all ages). Here we have the absurd plot twists, the twisted town of twisted people (and half-people), haunted forests, wig shops that will make you never want to visit another wig shop, and other pleasures that feel much more true to Sala’s work. And Delphine provides an opportunity to see Sala working with sepia shading and brushwork that is new and which works really well. The story is still in its earliest development, but already we are hooked (as are the underage members of the household). We would much rather follow Sala through the twisted streets of a story he is making up as he goes along than through the most carefully plotted traditional ghost story. Because the pleasure of his work does not lie in traditional places, but in the wrong turn that leads to unimaginable and unjustifiable violence—and absurd and unjustifiable laughter.