He has stated that his love of reading and his interest in comic books and horror films helped him deal with real-life fears.

He then worked as a freelance illustrator, something he had begun doing while in college, and a cartoonist, publishing his first comic book, Night Drive, in 1984.

Colossal Pictures hired Sala to animate one of the stories from Night Drive called "Invisible Hands."

Evil Eye also introduced Peculia, a mysterious black-haired waif whose fairy tale-inspired adventures include encounters with murderous children, necrophiles, cat-women, and zombies.

Sala has also worked on projects with Lemony Snicket, Steve Niles, and The Residents, and illustrated Doctor Sax and The Great World Snake, a script written in the 1960s by Jack Kerouac, which, like Sala's own work, makes use of pulp genre conventions such as vampires and shadowy avengers.