If you like old vampire movies and great comics, you're going to love this book!

Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires (2005. Fantagraphics)
Story and Art: Richard Sala
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

When a member of the Baby Sitters Club mysteriously disappears, Peculia is recruited by the remaining three girls to help with a special assignment that required all four members: The new family in Groon Grove have needs that require special attention... 

Richard Sala's reluctant monster-fighter returns for a full-length adventure in "Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires", and she once again find herself under threat when all she wanted to do was hang out with other teen girls and do some babysitting/caregiving. While Peculia may not have the fun experience she was hoping for, I think readers of this book who enjoy classic horror films and well-crafted comics will have a great time reading it. Sala once again delivers a deftly told tale that delivers chills and chuckles in equal measure.

"Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires" is a fun tribute to classic horror and vampire films, with nods to the greats from Universal Pictures during the 1940s and Hammer Films during the 1960s, as well as some familiar elements from 1980s slasher flicks. Sala had a love of and respect for these films, and it shows in his work. He was also one of an ever-diminishing crop of writers/artists who understood and had fully mastered the art of the comic book medium, knowing how to lay out a page to keep the reader's eye moving to what's important; knowing when to use a long shot, medium shot, or close up; and knowing how to pace a story one page at a time to encourage the reader to keep turning them to see what happens next. I feel like Sala did some of his best work on the Peculia stories in general and this book in particular. He uses a starker style than in many of his other works, with lots of contrasting solid whites and blacks that sometimes feel like woodcuts; and his scripts are more economical and done in style that harkens back to old-time newspaper comic strips where, supported by traditional visual cues that were also originated in the newspaper strips. While this is true of much of Sala's work from the early 1990s onward, it is most evident in the Peculia stories, I feel.

This approach--of letting the art speak for itself--heightens both the humor and horror in this book, making its best moments even better. And there are some really good moments in this book. 

Sala has some wonderful, wordless scenes featuring George, a young boy who is being baby-sat by one of the soon-to-be-vampire-victims. George fills the role of a comic relief character who spends the story running from horror scene to horror scene, but, who in the end plays a pivotal role in the success of the hero--a kind of character that was a mainstay of the 1940s horror films that served as part of Sala's inspiration here. Sala, however, does a much better job with George than many of the screenwriters did with such characters Back in the Day; George is cute and funny where the old-time comic relief characters were oftentimes more annoying than anything else.

Other highlights are Peculia's mostly silent fights against the vampires; she's always been a girl of few words, but this is more true here than in almost any of her previous appearances. Her silence alternatively makes the horror and humor of her various scenes far greater than it would have been if Sala had caused a quip or a cry to issue forth from her.

Few books are perfect, but the only major flaw I find with this the presentation of how Peculia dispatches two of the vampires. Sala plays a similar gag back-to-back, and I would have preferred a little more variety, or at least a little more distance between the two. (The first time he plays it, it unfolds over what are two of the very best pages in the book.. which could also be why it doesn't work as well the second time around.)

In balance, however, "Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires" is an excellent read that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys classic vampire movies and well-done graphic novels/comic books.

'Peculia' is a swift and entertaining read

Peculia (2002, Fantagraphics)
Story and Art: Richard Sala
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Peculia wanders the countryside and neighborhood around her mansion and encounters various supernatural menaces, usually after disregarding advice from her faithful servant, Ambrose.

Peculia was one of Richard Sala's signature characters. She's a young woman who usually appears wearing a "little black dress", When she's not being menaced by odd creatures or villains who seem to have stepped out of B-movies or gothic romances, she's being stalked by the mysterious Obscurus and his agent Justine. Exactly what the relationship is between Obscurus, Justine, and Peculia is never revealed, but there are hints that Obscuras and Peculia were once romantically involved, or at least very good friends, and that Justine is jealous of them. What caused the rift between Peculia and Obscurus, why he is isolated in a secret base and always masked is also never revealed--although he seems to be suffering under some of magical curse--but his spying on Peculia through Justine just as often puts Peculia in danger as saves her from it.

"Peculia" collects nine short tales that originally appeared in "Evil Eye" 1-9 during 1998 and 1999. Each is a self-contained story, and each feature a mix of horror and humor for which Sala's whimsical, simple art style is the perfect vehicle. The tone of stories reminds me of Poverty Row 1940s horror flicks with more than a little 1960s/70s Eurotrash horror movies and sex comedies throw in--and I'm invoking those in a positive way, as I find many of those movies quite fun and these comics capture the best of what they have to offer.

Over the course of the nine tales, Peculia's strolls brings her into encounters with weird gremlins who are attracted to music; three witches with a strange secret; a crazed widower who would cause many Edgar Allen Poe characters to reexamine their choices in life; a strange mystic sorority and the chutuloid monster that ends up dooming them, a homicidal girl battling a cult devoted to Bast; hoards of zombies and maniacs; a psychopathic psychiatrist conducting unholy research on unwilling subjects; Death himself; and more weird townsfolk than you think could be packed into one book. And all of this while Justine and Obscurus lurk nearby to either cause or solve problems.

While the first five tales in the book get increasingly good, and the remaining four hold steady-qualitywise, I still have to quibble with the fact that we never get an explanation for why Obscurus is seemingly cursed with total anonymity toward anyone but Justine; it's the one thing that I was disappointed over when I got to the end of the book. On the other hand, I was so delighted by the tiny continuity detail that tied the first story and eighth story in the book together that I am almost able to overlook my annoyance and so keep my rating of Seven of Ten Stars for the book.

"Peculia" is a swift and enjoyable read. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys crisp, straightforward cartooning and horror stories told with a sense of humor. (As a final note, I should mention that the book also contains a never-before-published color story. It's a fun, wordless little tale, but we don't talk about things that aren't in black-and-white in these parts!)

Post-Script From the Department of Odd Observations

In her first appearance--originally in "Evil Eye" #1 (1998)--she wore a pair of black shoes, perfectly matched to her little black dress.

There was a time where Peculia wore shoes...

She left those shoes behind halfway through her second appearance appearance--in "Evil Eye" #2 (1998)--and she went barefoot everywhere from then on (which was 10 more issues of "Evil Eye", various pin-ups., and "Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires" (2005).

... but, once she left them behind, she never wore shoes again.

What does this mean? We have no idea, but we further observed that most female characters that appeared in the Peculia stories were barefoot. (The four panels above were excerpted from the first and second stories in the "Peculia" (2002) collection.)