3 out of 5

I can’t remember why I passed over ‘Chew’ when it first hit the stands.  I don’t think I was reading many Image books at that point (2009), despite their having very much recovered from the artist-driven Spawn days.  I suppose there just seemed to be an ‘Invincible’ haze hanging over the publisher – really average books hiding under fan acclaim because they do one bold thing.  Since ‘Chew’s one bold thing seems to be cannibalism – or rather Cibopathicism, which is what allows the lead Tony Chu to “see” the history or a person or item by tasting / eating it – it very much reeked of that same folly.  (Folly reeks.)  And Rob Guillory’s art had that same cartoonish expressiveness as ‘Invincible’s Cory Walker, though definitely leaning toward a more absurd, exaggerated style.

Oddly, even though I just bought the first trade (in 2014), I can’t tell you why.  The ‘Chew / Revival’ mini-series just kicked off, and I guess some write-up on that sparked my curiosity, and the trade was attractively priced at 9.99, so here we are.

…And you know, from the first few pages in, which I started on the train ride back from the comic shop, I was ready to jump off the train and grab the rest of the books and speed through them so I could force them on my friends to read.  It was that much fun.  For the first issue.  The oddball setup of a world where chicken is currently outlawed and the FDA is a big policing authority was pleasingly more skewed than I was expecting, and the initially “grim” nighttime stakeout setting was a nice juxtaposition for Guillory’s art.  Cop Tony Chu goes bonkers when trying to catch a killer and decides to snack on him to find out all the dirt on the killer’s victims… leading to his being let go from one agency, only to be picked up by the FDA, who immediately tasks him with applying his special skills to go through a backlog of cases.  It’s a perfect freaking setup for an ongoing, and you could tell right away why this was optioned for a TV series.  Issue 2 picks up with Tony on his first case, so we seem to be off and running… but, uh, turns out Tony’s not the only Cibopath on the team, and turns out he falls in love with a girl, and turns out Layman is going to up the cannibalism ante with frequent vomit gags…  …and the surprisingly sharp oddball comic almost immediately becomes routine.  The only thing we need is some type of deeper conspiracy that’s only woven into the plot via withheld information that will be doled out, probably, in selected issues (meaning its a non-organic extension to the core story), which, yay, John provides within a couple issues, with some more body fluid spewing gags.  The series is still entertaining, but the moodiness of that first issue is gone, and in its place, we just have, indeed, that ‘one bold thing.’  Which, if that works for you, then that works for you.  But I think I’ll be getting off the ride after this first trade, which makes my bookshelf happy.

In terms of the trade – squared, glued binding, and the sturdy but thin cover / paper stock that we should all be familiar with from Image / Marvel / etc. 9.99 – 19.99 trades.  One extra page that translates a particularly annoying sequence of withheld information via (within the issue) a Russian-speaking assassin.  So nothing much, but that’s why we get a nifty budget price, and it sold me.