It Will All Be Over Before You Know It...

The Prestigious Banquet To Be Held In My Honor

PLEASE NOTE:  The artwork for this entire strip is available for purchase here:

Comic Art Collective - Richard Sala - The Prestigious Banquet - 7 page strip Original comic art from top artists

Dogs and Our Id ~

Here is a comic strip done for the late lamented "Special Report" ~ one of a series of oversized, glossy magazines created and published by Whittle Communications (the remarkable and generous cash cow for many an illustrator back in the 1990s).  Whittle was known for (among other things) their magazines that were created especially to be placed in doctors' waiting rooms.  Don't laugh - it was a great idea! 

Anyway, for this assignment, I was given excerpts of the book and asked to create a light-hearted comic strip, which I attempted to do.  It was published as a double-page spread. 

 I parted long ago with the original art, so these scans are from the actual printed pages.  I'm not crazy about the reproduction -- the main problem, in that pre-digital, era was that the reds and yellows I used often came out way too harsh - heavy and dark - and this is the case here.  But, it's okay, I guess, not a disaster or anything as some of my earlier printed illustrations were...

  Anyway, in my family we always had dogs when I was growing up and I always loved drawing them -  so it was a fun job.

"Doll Parts"

Here is the original, uncropped (un-cleaned-up) art for a strip done especially for the PECULIA book collection ~

My Father's Brain (part 1)

This strip was reprinted in my book Maniac Killer Strikes Again! in a somewhat altered state. Here is the original version as it appeared in the long-out-of-print anthology Blab #8.

Scroll down for part 2. (Yes - once again I have to divide the strip up - this time because of Blogger's limitations on image posting.)

My Father's Brain (part 2)

Psychorama - part 1

Here is "PSYCHO-RAMA" - a silly strip I did in 1992. It appeared in the anthology BLAB #7, which was one of the early digest-sized issues, and hasn't ever been reprinted.

Back then each issue of BLAB was given a (loose) theme by the editor Monte Beauchamp, and the one for this issue was "Mental Health." The other contributors included Dan Clowes (cover), Chris Ware, Joe Coleman, Drew Friedman, Gary Lieb, Mary Fleener and Frank Stack, along with a short story by Josh Alan Friedman.

This strip was a lark. It was one of those times (I'm sure other artists know well) where you need an idea and finally just throw up your hands and say, "Oh, for heaven's sake -- just do an alphabet!" Then I got to have fun coming up with bad rhymes and awful jokes (similar to what I did later in The Ghastly Ones). Basically -- I just wanted any excuse to draw lots of creepy characters doing nasty things.

Because of the limits on uploading pictures on Blogger, I'm posting the strip in three parts -- scroll down for the next two. Thanks for looking!

Psychorama - part 2

Psychorama - part 3

The Old Man In The Picture

This is a two-page comic I made last Halloween for an anthology called Half-Minute Horrors, a collection of spooky stories for kids (ages 9-12) by a wide range of authors and artists, edited by Susan Rich and published by HarperCollins.

Haircut (1987)

Here is an old strip I recently came across - I didn't realize I still had it. It's from years and years ago - during the rise of "alternative" comics in the 1980s. It was originally published in some long forgotten anthology in 1987 and then reprinted in my book HYPNOTIC TALES in 1992.

I never seemed to really fit into the "alt" scene of those days, although I wanted to. For example, I wasn't interested in doing autobiographical comics which just about every alternative cartoonist back then did at some point - it seemed to be almost expected. All I wanted to write was fiction -- fiction free of the usual genre trapping found in comics. Certainly there were other cartoonists who were serious about doing that, too -- Gilbert Hernandez in particular, comes to mind. Admittedly, my stories tended to read more like fever dreams than narratives with a beginning, middle and end. I was (and still am) inspired by writers who gleefully dive into absurd and dark places, who may suddenly make abrupt turns into delirium or senseless violence. I loved black humor. And I loved employing the first-person "unreliable narrator" technique as well (that is, in this case, what the character was telling you was happening wasn't necessarily what you, the reader, saw was happening).

I also wasn't interested in the other typical trends found in alt comics in those days. There were funny animal comics (but, like, not for kids) and "variety show" comics (you know, the kind of comics that tried to follow in the footsteps of the great Eightball). Fantasy was big in alternative comics back then, too, believe it or not. The scene was crawling with elves and trolls and "wise-cracking" fish and rodents in capes and horse-headed people in love. (I mean, young cartoonists today probably wouldn't believe what was considered "alternative" back then). I also didn't feel my forte was in the field of scatological comics or comics that "pushed" any kind of boundaries or made any overt political statements. Back then I just wanted to write these odd little short stories, admittedly based on my own neurotic preoccupations. I saw myself as an expressionist, not a naturalist. I liked symbols and subtext, and madness and delirium. I like to depict things becoming unhinged, falling apart in ways that were psychological -- as far removed from "slice of life" and sympathetic characters as possible. My stories also flirted with elements of horror -- something else you rarely saw in alternative comics back then, believe it or not.

But there was a lot of the "I don't get it" reaction (in fact, that's STILL pretty much the reaction a lot of these early stories get!) - enough to figure that maybe I wasn't communicating my intentions properly. That's a real, legitimate concern for an artist.

Anyway -- Eventually, my love of genre elements - elements from thrillers and horror in particular - began to become a more prominent factor in my work. What really pushed me in that direction ultimately was the reaction to "Invisible Hands", which was a little tongue-in-cheek story that appeared in my self-published "Night Drive" in 1984. It was different from most of my work at that time. It was an expression of my life-long love for old-time mystery movies and pulps, written in a (fake) serial format. It was purchased by MTV out of the blue and was made into a cartoon in 1989. I honestly thought people wouldn't "get" that either -- well, most people didn't -- but a surprising amount apparently did. MTV had required me to turn my fake serial into an actual one, with a real story-line and a real ending. I enjoyed doing that more than I can say. I was in heaven. Instead of "commenting" on the genre, I was in it, actually a part of it, writing the kind of (absurd, mysterious, often frankly silly) story I always loved. It finally dawned on me -- this is who I am and who I always was. I just needed room to stretch out and tell long, complex stories. Eventually I was able to do that -- and, despite the time-consuming, labor-intensive nature of writing and drawing comics, it's really what I now feel most at home doing.

For anyone who may be interested (or has read this far!), I'm also putting "Haircut" up for sale. I'm going to offer it as a set, rather than as individual pages, for now. Interested parties may contact me directly at richard@richardsala.com -- or you may go on over to The Comic Art Collective and purchase it there. Here's the link: Comic Art Collective - Art by Richard Sala - Original comic art from top artists

Even if you do that, you should still consider writing to me directly afterwards. I can always help speed the process along. (Update: It looks like the strip has been sold. Thank you!)

Thank you, loyal readers!

Strange Question -- part 1