Poison Flowers and Pandemonium is 311 pages of weird and beautiful art and insanity. The best kind. No really, these stories are insane. I loved them!
Poison Flowers & Pandemonium comprises four separate graphic novellas that showcase Sala’s love of B-movie horror, silent film-era archetypes, and femmes fatale. House of the Blue Dwarf features master criminal the Bloody Cardinal, who leaves a trail of mayhem and madness everywhere he goes. Monsters Illustrated highlights Sala’s visual imagination through a fun riff on monster movies. Cave Girls of the Lost World is a campy romp about a team of young women whose plane crashes in a land forgotten by time and rife with dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, and apemen. The volume is rounded out with Fantomella, an action-packed thrill ride starring a mysterious masked heroine. Taken in sum, this collection is a fitting capstone to Sala’s prolific, idiosyncratic cartooning career.
Richard Sala was wonderfully unique… It was all there in everything he did, his love of old monster movies, the pulps, mystery and horror in general ― the good stuff and the terrible ― wore it all like a badge of honor and did wonderful things with it. I miss him. – Eisner Award-winning Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.
Having this land in my inbox was exciting! The title alone drew me in. Who doesn’t love the idea of pandemonium?
I flew through this book and felt a bit bad that I hadn’t known about Sala before this. His art and storytelling style is right up my alley. And Cave Girls of the Lost world is pretty much perfection in my eyes and Fantomella is just as amusing and infuriating as my other favorite super hero stories. If you like the strange and the wonderful, you should totally check this out, you definitely will not be disappointed. Poison Flowers and Pandemonium released today, May 4th from Fantagraphics.
