He remained on the book through Deathblow #12. Late 1993 also saw Sale's next major ongoing series, as Jim Lee had launched the noir series, Deathblow, using a new Frank Miller-inspired art style, but Lee decided to leave the series after its second issue, so Sale co-drew the third issue with Lee and then took over as the regular artist from Deathblow #4 on (working with Lee's original co-writer on the series, Brandon Choi). This led to his first Halloween-themed Batman one-shot, with 1993's Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special #1, working with Jeph Loeb again. That project was called Challengers of the Unknown and it sparked a collaborative relationship that lasted over thirty years.Īfter getting his 'in' at DC, Sale worked on a pair of notable Batman arcs in 1992, 'Blades' with writer James Robinson in Legends of the Dark Knight and 'Misfits' with writer Alan Grant in Shadow of the Bat. Sale was paired with a writer who was new to comics, the screenwriter, Jeph Loeb. Sale was then hired by editor Elliot S! Maggin for a miniseries at DC in 1991.

In 1988, Sale drew an issue of Matt Wagner's Grendel for Comico, where Sale would work on a few other projects before becoming the regular artist on Grendel in its final seven issues before Comico ceased publishing comic books. WaRP Graphics, at the time, had a deal with Starblaze Graphics to produce collections of its comics, and Sale was then given his first major penciling assignment, drawing Thieves' World, an adaptation of a different Aspirin work, a fantasy anthology where various authors would all tell stories set in a world created by Aspirin (under the theory that this way the other writers wouldn't have to spend any time doing world-building).

In 1983, Sale got a gig inking Phil Foglio on WaRP Graphics' comic book adaptation of Robert Lynn Aspirin's MythAdventures novels. Sale then moved back to Seattle and that is where his career stalled a bit in the early 1980s, as he later noted, 'I got discouraged in my 20s because the business was very New York-centric.' Luckily for Sale, the 1980s was also the start of the direct market independent comic book boom, where the burgeoning direct market allowed for small comic book publishers to co-exist with the bigger companies like Marvel and DC. After initially attending the University of Washington for college, he then moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts where he took a comic book workshop taught by Marvel legend, John Buscema. Sale was born in Ithaca, NY, in 1956, but he grew up in Seattle, WA.

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