Richard Sala is an American cartoonist, illustrator, and comic book creator with a unique expressionistic style whose books often combine elements of mystery, horror and whimsy.
Sala has mentioned the influence of his childhood years on his work. Growing up in a family dominated by an angry abusive father, he sought refuge in comic books and horror films, which he cites as having helped him deal with his real life fears. After attending college as an art major, and finally earning a Master of Fine Arts Degree in painting from Mills College, he took a job at a University Library which he supplemented with illustration jobs. Eventually, he discovered he was earning more from his part-time illustration work than his library job and decided to make the leap to freelancing full-time. Along the way he had self-published a book of drawings and text in 1984 titled Night Drive.
More of a reflection of his art school education than a typical comic book, Night Drive nevertheless ended up opening doors for Sala that would eventually lead to his rediscovering and embracing his childhood love of comics and monsters. The book came to the attention of several individuals who contacted Sala to request work. These included Art Spiegelman, Monte Beauchamp and Colossal Pictures and resulted in his appearances in two highly regarded comic anthologies - Spiegelman's RAW and Beauchamp's BLAB!. Colossal Pictures hired Sala to animate one of the stories from Night Drive called "Invisible Hands". This was eventually expanded by Sala and director Denis Morella into a 12-minute story about a psychic detective, a hooded criminal, taxidermy, a costume party and a secret society of one-handed killers, all done in Sala's usual tongue-in-cheek style. Divided into 2-minute chapters so it could be shown as a serial, "Invisible Hands" debuted on the first season of Liquid Television Show, which also featured the television debuts of Beavis and Butthead and Ĉon Flux.
Since then, Sala has continued as a prolific illustrator and comic book artist. Two of his books, The Chuckling Whatsit and Mad Night began as serial. They are epic thrillers - each one a tour de force of complex storytelling and black humor, with characters that range from beautiful pirate women to violent lunatics and grotesques to a "girl detective" named Judy Drood. The Chuckling Whatsit first appeared in the anthology Zero Zero. Mad Night was initially serialized in Sala's 12-issue comic book series Evil Eye, published by Fantagraphics Books. Evil Eye also introduced possibly Sala's most intriguing character, Peculia, a mysterious black-haired barefoot waif whose fairy-tale inspired adventures include run-ins with murderous children, necrophiles, cat-women and zombies. Evil Eye ran for twelve issues, between 1998 and 2001.
Sala has also worked on projects with Lemony Snicket, Steve Niles and The Residents and illustrated Doctor Sax and The Great World Snake, a remarkable rediscovered script written in the 1960s by Jack Kerouac, which, like Sala's own work, makes use of pulp genre conventions such as vampires and shadowy avengers.
