Customer Reviews

Peculia

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Imaginatively written and deftly drawn by Richard Sala, Peculia is a unique and highly recommended black-and-white graphic novel that connects the bizarre adventures of a truly unusual girl from the comic book series "Evil Eye." The plucky young lady confronts witches, madmen, evil children, and other denizens of the macabre in this tongue-in-cheek, distinctively drawn, and succinctly presented collection.

The book is a series of vignettes featuring the character "Peculia", a teenage/twentysomething girl wearing a small dress who lives in a strange world filled with monsters, demons, zombies, people who dress up as superheroes, witches, and jealous ex-boyfriends who are inexplicably world-renowned villains. Welcome to the world of Richard Sala.

The stories are too short to really go anywhere (they're often around 10 pages) and feature Peculia getting into some scrape, usually being kidnapped, and then escaping.

The writing/stories aside, the real treasure in this book is Sala's artwork. The backgrounds in which he puts his weird characters makes for a hugely compelling world, filled with cottages in black forests with men in black coats and top hats stalking amongst the trees, or a gothic house on a cliff filled with dead bodies and murderous children, or castles with mad nobles living with the corpses of their beloveds.

The comparisons are many - Poe, Tim Burton, Hammer Horror, Scooby Doo, Stoker - but Sala manages to find a place amongst these greats and create a unique and original comic book. I feel there's more to Sala than this book so while I think this isn't the best comic book to read, I loved the artwork so much I'm going to buy more of his books to see if he gets better (I'm sure he will).

If you've ever read Sala then you know what he's about-grotesque murderers, sinister secret societies, the odd and the bizarre. Facing off against all of the above is Peculia, his most charming and clever heroine yet.
These stories are like much of Sala's other work but with a more light-hearted tone. This is a lot of fun-buy it immediately.