Richard Sala’s ‘Night Drive,’ Back In Print

For the first time in 41 years, the late Richard Sala’s self-published debut comic, Night Drive, is back in print.  It arrives courtesy of his longtime publisher Fantagraphics.  Sala died in 2020 at the age of 65, leaving behind a series of gruesome horror and noir comics, like The Chuckling Whatsit, Peculia, The Graverobber’s Daughter, In a Glass Grotesquely, among others.  Although, calling them “comics” might have gotten you an argument from Sala himself, who once described the work in Night Drive (to this edition’s editor), Dana Marie Andra, as “comic strip inspired.”

That’s true, in the way that lots of ‘80s boomer culture self-consciously and openly embrace its influences while distancing itself at the same time.  In the way that Blue Velvet is noir-inspired, that Letterman’s Late Night is Tonight Show-inspired, that Pee Wee’s Playhouse is Saturday morning kid’s show-inspired, Sala’s art revels in all the genre and comics-as-medium expectations that define his work as horror and detective comics.  But they also speak a language all their own language to the reader the whole time.  With Sala, seeing all the murder and crime cliches is like watching a noir in a theater full of fellow afficionados who, like you, have seen a movie like this many, many times before, and seeing all these weirdos again is midnight comfort food.

Sala isn’t going in for any suspension of disbelief.  He lovingly emphasizes the two-dimensionality of comics all over Night Drive.  He wants us to self-consciously read his work, but he does want us to read it.  Sala loves this stuff too much to have us engage in any serious medium examination or genre deconstruction on his dime.  It’s there if you want it, but so is that car driving off a cliff, or his character Spots, examining an old clock for clues, when a secret compartment pops open on him.  “Yow!  A pair of human eyes!”

And Sala does love this stuff.  Voodoo dolls, flatfoots, swamis, creepy ventriloquist dummies, trench coats, fedoras, hallucinatory midnight drives, and a signature sense of straight-faced, hard-boiled absurdity to go with it.  As one of his desperate narration captions reads, “A narrow escape – driving down the foggy strip between the House of Trauma and Vengeance Museum …”.

His Night Drive pages have a deceptive raw-style, a first-glance crudeness, as if a bored high-school kid might have drawn them in home room.  Like a Thurber “scrawl,” one might take it for granted, but then Sala’s sense of composition, layout, and fully-formed design sense make absolutely clear we’re in the presence of a much more sophisticated artist from day one.

When Sala’s comics appeared, he quickly found a home with likeminded artists at art spiegelman’s RAW such as Lynda Barry, Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, Kaz, Drew Friedman, Julie Doucet.  Besides a reprint of the original 34-page Night Drive – down to the indica with Sala’s College Avenue home address in Berkeley, California – this volume includes a forward by Andra, an afterward by Clowes, interviews with Sala, and several unpublished pages that Sala cut from the original.

Andra notes that Sala discussed this work with a dismissive tone at times.  Perhaps, but in comparing his debut here to the previous reissue in this series, one gets the sense that comes from an older artist wincing at his earlier skills with a master’s eye.  He never abandoned his style or his voice, he only got better at it.