Are you looking for something new in reading? How about a three-volume comic book that begins with a coach and his ping pong champion trapped in a bled in the United States where every inhabitant seems totally idiotic? With Valhalla Hotel, Glenat editions invites you to stay in this totally crazy world.
An unexpected start
In Valhalla Hotel, the reader is immediately disoriented. A long road cuts the desert in two and we quickly recognize a desert plain of the United States. A pink combi carrying pigs is driven by a German looking like a movie Nazi. It is hardly doubled by a Mini. Its two occupants, Malone and Lenney, cross this impoverished area to get to the qualifiers for the Olympic table tennis games. When the broken down mini parks on the side of the road, a narrow-minded and homophobic policeman stops the occupants for illegal camping. Malone is sorely lacking in diplomacy by getting angry, and he logically ends up in a cell with Lenny. These foreigners then land in the small town of Flatstone and are forced to stay there while waiting for their car to be repaired. Far from calming down, the weirdness will be growing in Valhalla Hotel – as the action accelerates. Unlikely encounters with locals regularly spice up the story: a sex offender prefers to sleep in a cell than live at home, El Loco an impressive hermit fan of hard rock, and on the outskirts, a large community of German pig farmers and producers of the best charcuterie in the country. Halfway through the story, the story switches to the fantastic with mysterious samples although very pleasant.
A hilarious first volume
The super funny moments in the first volume of the Valhalla Hotel multiply especially around coach Malone, because he takes everything to the first degree, and his obsession with his sport amuses the reader. With his mute champion Lenny, they listen on cassette to a match analyzing the rhythm changes of the peaks and pocs. Starting from an idea of the cartoonist Fabien Bedouel, the scriptwriter Pat Perna knew how to multiply the jokes and the dialogues well felt. 
The movie buff will feel in a known world by being immersed in a Coen brothers comedy on some pages, and an action movie for Tarantino for other passages. The cartoonist Fabien Bedouel integrates into his realistic style trognes worthy of actors of supporting roles whose name we never know, but whose face we recognize in an instant. But his talent is also asserted in the decorations certainly simple but always evocative and well framed by very pretty clean lines, decor. We can finally highlight a very beautiful game on onomatopoeias and its beautiful bright colors.
Politics is never far away
Valhalla Hotel is not only a long joke but it incorporates a message against religious fundamentalism without turning it into a painful pamphlet. The message also passes without the dialogues – a huge cross is in the middle of the small town and, in one corner of the box, an evangelical billboard is torn revealing underneath an advertisement for an arms sales fair. Pat Perna also features strong female figures – a mechanic and especially Deputy Maloney who seems to be the only one in the city to have common sense by reminding a colleague that the law does not allow stopping without a valid reason. This first volume of Valhalla Hotel is a hilarious debut of series b mixing all genres. The well-felt dialogues, colorful characters and a simple but effective drawing raise the story to a much higher quality and a cliffhanger announces a great series. Eagerly the sequel! If you like crazy worldviews, we also recommend the adaptation of Watch Dogs Legion reviewed on this link or The brain drain here.
