New York - Miami

In such previous collections as Love Shots , Loustal's illustrational gifts, in combination with Paringaux's fixation on lower-class squalor and upper-class decadence, produced a vision of America influenced by detective movies and crime journalism. The two Frenchmen again offer comics of unusual literary artifice and sensitivity with this new volume that continues to present oddly affecting extracts from the lives of their eccentric and convincing characters: the deluded rock groupie of ``Miss Fan USA''; the mordantly witty--and stylishly rendered--sexual encounter of ``The Question''; or the noir ish male lovers of ``Marcello'' and their amusing and violent partnership. The drawing styles, inventive and beautifully executed, vary between stories, changing the mood of each. The collaborators' fascination with black American life, not always successfully utilized here, is best interpreted in ``La Vie En Blues,'' where their ability to create lyrical period pieces captures both the blues sensibility and the gritty mythologies of 1940s urban black life. (May)