DOUGLAS: So the clever premise behind John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew #27 is that last month’s issue was #18, and next month’s will be #19, and this one is effectively a time capsule from what the series will be like a year in the future. It’d be even more clever, except that, as I’m sure my fellow Comic Book Club geeks remember, this particular gag’s been done before too. Back in the late ’90s, Christopher Priest and Mark Bright’s fantastic series Quantum and Woody abruptly ceased publication with #17, then a year and a quarter later returned with #32–the third part of a four-part story–as if the series had been running all along, and you just hadn’t been able to find it. (The next month, it picked up where it left off, with #18… and then its publisher, Acclaim, went out of business after #21. Oh well.)
This one’s allegedly the second of a five-episode arc: our regular protagonist (Tony Chu, an FDA agent who can psychically sense the history of anything by eating it) is in the hospital and in a bad way, and his role is pretty much being filled by his twin sister, Antonelle “Tony” Chu. I’ve always had mixed feelings about this series: I like how much style it has, and how unlike any other comic of the moment it is in its look and tone, but its “thriller” plot never quite gets thrilling, and the jokey parts push very hard for jokes that only occasionally connect. The one really funny idea here is hinted at by the cover: a team of scientists working on a project in isolation in the Amazon jungle, bored out of their minds and with lots of time to kill, become connoiseurs of licking psychedelic frogs. Mostly–and I know this is a strange reaction to this series–I keep wishing Chew had more interesting things to say about food. I know it’s unfair to expect this series to be Oishinbo as a farcical Dragnet, but food culture is so weird as it is that it just seems like there’s fertile ground that Layman and Guillory aren’t tilling.
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EVAN: I’m coming in almost completely cold on Chew. I know that it came out the gate as an unexpected hit and have heard the basic premise talked about, but I’ve never read a single issue. So, I treated issue 27 as a experiment to see just much I’d enjoy jumping into the deep, deep end of Chew‘s goings-on.
And I dug it. Guillory’s art is cartoony with a lean towards grafitti scratchiness, which gives the occasionally goofy character designs weight and menace when needed. I liked how Layman mixes in an awareness of grim circumstance underneath some really silly imaginings. Take the chogs, for example–chicken-frog hybrids. It’s a stupid, throwaway joke but one anchored in the fact that meat’s nearly contraband in Chew universe. As hilarious as the frickens look, the scene where they get stolen looks like it hurts terribly. As a new reader, I did want a sense of how similar or different Tony and Antonelle are, a way to pass the lead character baton between the siblings. It also seemed weird that the twins’ superpower gets such a narrow spotlight in Chew #27. Is it always like that?
GRAEME: Pretty much, yeah; Chew has always treated Tony’s power as almost background matter-of-fact, much like any other skillset that someone could have, in my opinion.
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What surprised me most about this issue was how unsurprising it was. Is it naive to hope that the “this issue is from the future!” stunt would offer something other than a regular issue, only with a disconnected story? I wanted some kind of shift, stylistically or tonally, and I don’t feel like I got it. On the one hand, this is probably good news for the more-faithful fans of the series, who can rest assured that More Of The Same lies ahead, but as someone who likes but doesn’t love the book, I was hoping for something braver, perhaps, or more daring–something that would suggest that the book is heading somewhere I wouldn’t expect, and make me excited to see how we end up there. Instead, there’s this, which… is good, but somehow disappointing, because it feels as if it wastes the gimmick, if that makes sense. Somehow, the idea of “just” another issue of light comedy thriller with Rob Guillory’s very distinctive art (which, this far in, I still can’t work out if I like or not) doesn’t feel like it’s enough for what I expected from this issue.