Cave Girls of the Lost World,


By Richard Sala (Fantagraphics Books Digital Exclusive)
No ISBN: ASIN: B07H487P65

Richard Sala is a lauded and much-deserving darling of the Literary Comics movement (if such a thing exists), blending beloved pop culture artefacts and conventions – particularly cheesy comics and old horror films – with a hypnotically effective ability to tell a graphic tale. His compelling pictorial sagas appeal greatly to kids of all ages.

He grew up in Chicago and Arizona before earning a Masters Degree in Fine Arts. Soon after beginning a career as an illustrator he rediscovered his early love of comicbooks and icons of popular mass culture, such as cop shows and horror movies. He’s never looked back…

The release of potentially metafictional and self-published Night Drive in 1984 led to appearances in legendary 1980s anthologies Raw and Blab! and animated adaptations of the series on Liquid Television.

His work is welcomingly atmospheric, dryly ironic, wittily quirky and mordantly funny; indulgently celebrating childhood terrors, gangsters, bizarre events, monsters and manic mysteries, through iconic lead characters as girl sleuth Judy Drood and the glorious trenchant storybook investigator Peculia: to date the most well-known and utilised of his gratifyingly large repertory of characters.

Sala’s art is a joltingly jolly – if macabre – joy to behold and has also shone on many out-industry projects such as his work with Lemony Snickett, The Residents and even – albeit posthumously – Jack Kerouac; illustrating the author’s outrageous Doctor Sax and The Great World Snake. At the moment he’s devoting time to extended mystery webcomics Super-Enigmatix and The Cardinal. Oh, and this…

A (thus far) digital only release, Cave Girls of the Lost World is a marriage of text blocks and full-page illustrations cheekily referencing 1960s dinosaur cheesecake themes (as seen in One Million Years BC or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) with the plucky bonhomie of schoolgirls novels and comics of the same era. Think of The Four Marys in Conan Doyle’s Lost World and channelling the funnier parts of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies…

Actually, no, don’t. Think of very fetching cartoons heaving with gleeful irony…

The saga unfolds in four chapters as a young boy wanders a beach and finds a message in a bottle. It is a diary detailing the extraordinary fate which befell 30 female college applicants whose plane crashed onto a strange plateau where giant saurians, extinct precursor races of mankind and vegetable horrors still thrived and relates how the castaways learned to kill or perish…

Fans of Super-Enigmatix will be delighted to discover that some of the characters from that unfolding drama play a crucial part here, too…

    Beguiling, clever, and staggeringly engaging, this yarn blends nostalgic escapism with the childish frisson of children scaring themselves silly under the bedcovers at night and will leave every unrepentant fantasy fan hungry for more…
    Cave Girls of the Lost World © 2018 Richard Sala. This edition © 2018 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.