Night Drive
Night DriveCartoonist: Richard Sala
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Designer: Daniel Clowes
Production: Paul Baresh
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: May 2025
It’s been a banner year for beautiful new books that collect previously hard to find work by the great American cartoonist of the past generation. Particularly a couple guys named Richard. I’ve spent a decent chunk of 2025 writing about Dark Horse Comics reproductions/remasterings of the comics of Richard Corben, and now today I’m sitting down (finally) with the new hardcover edition of Night Drive by Richard Sala, published by Fantagraphics.
As was the case with some of the Corben comics — specifically Den — Night Drive has long been out of print. For those unfamiliar, Night Drive is a series of stories that Sala published himself in the 1980s, all of which blend creepy pulp influences with a sensibility that skews more toward fine art, rather than narrative, as Sala would favor in later more linear works, like The Chuckling Whatsit. Night Drive is essentially a series of vignettes, with inherent variance between pieces, but they are all uniformly steeped in mystery and feeling, rather than structure and narrative.
To some extent, Night Drive feels like clear insight into Sala’s inclinations and sensibilities as an artist, into the type of work he initially set out to do as well as the clear influences that informed it. This new hardcover was my first opportunity to read the Night Drive comics, after long being familiar with The Chuckling Whatsit, and as such I think I came to these pieces looking for a connection to what was to come later. And I definitely think I found that, or at least glimpsed hints of connective tissue between the two.
But these pieces also stand on their own as fascinating cartooning, independent of any knowledge of Sala or his other work. Some years ago, I was visiting friends and family in my hometown near Chicago, and we took a trip to the Art Institute (arguably the country’s finest art museum). On display was the work of the Chicago fine-art comics collective, The Hairy Who. Each piece was rough-hewn but layered, moving but unpretentious, and they wore their influences proudly and openly.
I found turning the pages of Night Drive to be a similar experience to attending the exhibition. It’s the type of work that will have you lingering over each page, and immediately starting from the beginning, awash with feeling and seeking to intellectualize bits of it. There are panels that pay homage to Universal Monsters The Invisible Man, inserted organically into strips that use horror noir to contemplate the nature of paranoia.
What really elevated the experience of sorting through Night Drive for me, however, was the wealth of supplementary writing and material included in this new book. There are (obviously) comics in this book, but they are laid out between vital interviews, introductions and process materials that are inextricably linked to Sala’s actual artwork.
In this way, Night Drive feels like a hybrid comic-reference book, and perhaps the definitive book for those who want to get a better sense of who Sala was, what informed his art and how his peers contextualized his work within the era. That’s all packed into the relatively concise introductions, interviews and afterwards, written by Dana Marie Andra (a close friend of Sala’s, who also on one occasion collaborated with him and is the editor of this book), Leroy Douresseaux (who interviewed the artist in 2007), and Daniel Clowes (who also designed the new book), respectively.
What it all adds up to is a must-read book for anyone seeking to better understand Sala, or to broaden their experiences with his other work. I’ve got a copy for my shelf, and I’m putting it right between the new Corben editions and the book I purchased at The Hairy Who exhibition. It feels like the exact right place.
Night Drive is now available from Fantagraphics
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