Poison Flowers and Pandemonium by Richard Sala Review

Poison Flowers and Pandemonium is the last book by Richard Sala, published posthumously following his death in March 2020.

This omnibus includes: The Bloody Cardinal 2: House of the Blue Dwarf, Monsters Illustrated, Cave Girls of the Lost World (the only piece here previously published), and Fantomella. I’d like to say this was an excellent final book but unfortunately Poison Flowers and Pandemonium was actually pretty bad.

I wasn’t a fan of the first Bloody Cardinal book - a campy OTT superhero spoof - and the second one didn’t do much for me either. There are too many characters and a garbled plot which makes little sense or impression. Sala’s art, colours and lettering are the best they’ve ever looked though, and elements of the story are amusing, if random. Here’s a vampire! Did somebody say psychic powers? And how about a mad scientist?? I don’t think much of the Bloody Cardinal himself, either as a hero or anti-hero character. He’s just a dick who wears a bird mask and kills people left and right!

Monsters Illustrated is just a series of pin-ups where monsters are scaring young ladies. The framing device is a comic though as Sala’s recurring character Peculia visits a mysterious bookshop and picks up the book of pin-ups. Unlike most pin-up collections, you can imagine a story for each one, so there’s something going on in each - although that story is a basic one with monsters scaring young ladies!

I reviewed Cave Girls of the Lost World back in 2019 so I won’t go into it here - suffice it to say I think it was the worst thing Sala did.

Fantomella is another Sala heroine fighting costumed baddies in a twilit netherworld. Like The Bloody Cardinal 2, it’s confusing, campy, pointless, instantly forgettable, and gratuitously violent (which describes the majority of Sala’s later output).

The problem with this book, and others like it, is that Sala created two types of book: camp and straight horror. His camp books were largely terrible while his straight horror stuff was brilliant, so it’s a shame there’s only campiness in this book.

While I wouldn’t recommend Poison Flowers and Pandemonium, if you want to read some great Richard Sala books, I would highly recommend Delphine, Cat Burglar Black, The Hidden, and the Peculia books instead.

Sala was a unique comics creator with his own original style and I’m grateful that he produced the books he did and gave us the chance to enjoy his rich imagination and stories while he was here.