Hollywood, dream factory where nightmare is around the corner. Glénat offers us a very dark tour of the film studios in Balle tragique pour une série Z, released in February.
Can we love and be famous?
In the Disney studios in Los Angeles in 1958, Jimmy White, is reduced to play in a series for kids. Total shame! A thing about a certain "Zorro" but you have to live well. Jimmy also has debts. Five thousand dollars he owes to Giuseppe Battaglia. Everything is bad, but there is Sally Davis, a beautiful extra. However, Buddy Drummond, a Fox producer as powerful as vicious, offers his bride a leading role. The blood, Jimmy can't stand it… 
Not everything is rosy in Hollywood
Roger Seiter proposes to live behind the scenes of cinema through the misadventures of a second-rate actor. Hurt by Zorro, he is ashamed of this series – yet today cult. Some main characters are also interesting like Brenda, Jimmy's agent or Henry Calvin, the sergeant Garcia of the series, who organizes parties to find girls. Women are numerous in the story and are far from the image of the naive wife. Sally, Jimmy's bride is ready to do anything to succeed. Hedda Hopper is a gossip seeker, which will earn her a biting punishment… It all starts as a Ross MacDonald-style thriller before tipping over into Hellroy's gore and sordidness , starting with a visit to the medical examiner. However, one can find that the text is sometimes a bit long for no reason.
Blocked
Jimmy accumulates trouble because of his passion for the game and his bad choices. With each action, he makes the wrong decision and sinks deeper and deeper. Even the police hate him because of strong suspicions after the death of his previous girlfriend. The actor in crisis will have to face all the accusations. These different characters will help or push Jimmy but the spider web around him seems hopeless.
An original drawing
Pascal Regnauld (Canardo) makes radical graphic choices – the edge of the pages is entirely in black while the colors focus on shades of brown and red. The only white parts are the inking. The faces have very pointed shapes and almost without relief. The very cartoony spirit of the drawing contrasts with the dark detective story but the layout is sometimes frozen. The two authors offer an increasingly distressing detective story about the underside of the golden age of Hollywood, where everything is perversion. Each action is a piece on a chessboard that moves towards defeat. With Balle tragique pour une série Z, Glénat brings a new very dark stone into the strange Thirteen house.
