Delphine

Comicdom's master of the musty macabre retells (very loosely) the Snow White fairy tale from the point of view of a modern Prince Charming. With only an address on a scrap of paper, an unnamed young man searches for his college sweetie through a village full of crazies, dark woods seething with menace, and haunted mansions hung with wicked mirrors on the walls. Sala's high-class horror sensibility is equal parts sinister and gleeful: a wild cackle of frights steeped in the grand gothic tradition of Edward Gorey. The tale, originally serialized in Fantagraphics' Ignatz Series, is drawn in shades of doomful brown and accented by a few striking, full-color chapter breaks. Sala's quavery lines dish out plenty of unsettling images, and he ratchets up the eeriness with stylized, hand-drawn lettering. Though he sacrifices some narrative sense in favor of creepy atmospherics and downright baffling transitions, Sala does a fine job of keeping everything just slightly out of balance and off-kilter. Just take a guess at how happily this ever after turns out to be.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist

Inspired by Snow White, Sala's era-conflating fairy tale is coated in the kind of atmosphere the artist is known for: a creepy, gnarled darkness that evokes German Expressionism, Universal horror films of the 1930s, and secrets hiding in dank old mansions and haunted forests. Sala imagines the prince as an unnamed, lovelorn college student trying to locate his girlfriend, Delphine, who has disappeared after returning to her hometown. Upon entering the village, the student is thrust into a grotesque world where straightforward communication is impossible, where every resident's face looks like the stuff of nightmares, and where no one appears to know the first thing about Delphine. The territory is comfortable for Sala and familiar to fans, yet the execution is so carefully controlled and imaginative that one can't helped being charmed and thrilled by the spectacle of a master craftsman at work. A surprising, unsettling twist toward the end is the dead rose upon this freshly dug grave of creeping terror. To classify the book merely as an "update" or "interpretation" is to gloss over the brilliant evocation of mood and love of genre that Sala so expertly conveys. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.