Saturday Scream Queen: Peculia

Peculia made her first appearance in "Evil Eye" #1 (Fantagraphics 1998), a quarterly anthology title featuring stories written and drawn by Richard Sala. Peculia went onto become one of Sala's signature characters, as well as a favorite of her creator and his fans alike.

Most of Peculia's adventures start with her just going about her day... and end up with her fighting for her life against cultists, monsters, or bodice-ripping villains who have learned some tricks from mad scientists and mad slashers.

Peculia in a world where the horror and thriller movies of the 1920s through the 1950s could all easily have taken place, and where no one thought twice about encountering the supernatural or the by-products of mad science.

Sala never revealed much about Peculia's background. All we ever learn is that she's an orphan who lives alone in a large mansion located on the outskirts of a town. Here, she is looked after and assisted by a short manservant named Ambrose. Meanwhile, a bandage-swathed mystic known as Obscuras watches her from afar--although he and his minions cause almost as much trouble for Peculia as they rescue her from. 

In 2002, nine of Peculia's adventures were collected in "Peculia" (review and some excerpts here, including the history of our heroine's lost shoes). After the cancellation of "Evil Eye" in 2004, Sala revised and expanded the Peculia story from #11 into the graphic novel "Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires" (review here) in 2006.

Sala wrote in 2010 that he had several unpublished Peculia stories and "hundreds" of sketches and drawings involving her, and that he hoped to some day to a book collecting them. Sadly, Richard Sala passed away on May 7, 2020, and the Peculia collection he thought of never came to pass.

While many of Sala's Peculia sketches and drawings have made their way onto the internet over the years, there are at least two Peculia stories that have never been reprinted outside issues of "Evil Eye", and at this point we'll probably never get to see them, nor the treasure trove of unpublished material from his sketch- and notebooks.

But... Peculia lives on, wandering the countryside of the imagination and finding trouble, whether she is looking for it or not.

Finally, if someone has the good taste to make a Peculia movie, "Trouble is a Friend of Mine" MUST be the theme song for it. It's also great music to listen to get you in the mood to read any of Peculia's adventures... and the video has the added benefit that it feels like it could have been animated by Richard Sala!