Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Book-A-Day #97 (10/21): The Chuckling Whatsit by Richard Sala

Sala's comics are all the same sort of thing: pseudo-Gothic adventures with convoluted plots, a huge cast of strange characters (most of whom die before the end), some horror/fantasy elements, and a winking, knowing approach to the whole pulpish apparatus.

This is a good example of the type; I won't try to explain the plot, which is labyrinthine and deliberately over-convoluted, besides mentioning that it's there, and it's typical Sala. Some of his books are a somewhat lighter version of the same thing (like the Peculia books), and those tend to have female main characters -- this one has a young man as its "hero," and it's as dark as can be.

His art is particularly expressive here -- he uses a lot of spot blacks and lines of various width for shading. It's an exceptionally good style for black & white Gothic horror comics.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!
Edited 1/2/07: the huge list of links was getting annoying, and screwing up my Book-A-Day searches, so I've killed them in these posts that had them.

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