Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

/ Alex Good

Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

This is the first volume in the award-winning Chew series, written by John Layman and illustrated by Rob Guillory. And you could tell right away it was going to be great.

Why? I’d start with the terrific world-building. We’re in a world sort of like our own but with a slightly off-kilter history. Sometime previous to the action described, the world has suffered through an outbreak of what authorities determine was an avian flu, though some suspect that calling it bird flu was part of a cover-up for something more nefarious. In any event, tens of millions of people died and one of the results is that chicken is now a black-market menu item while the rest of us have to make do with synthetic substitutes like Poult-free and Chickyn. In the U.S. one of the most powerful government organizations now is the F.D.A., which still stands for the Food and Drug Administration. One of their top agents, Mason Savoy, is what’s known as a cibopath: someone who can, just from tasting food, be given a vision of its entire prehistory. Example: take a bite of an apple and know what tree it came from, what pesticides were used on it, and when it was picked.

And with a bite out of a corpse, a cibopath can tell how said corpse met its end.

There aren’t many cibopaths. One day Tony Chu, also a cibopath, is enlisted by Savoy into the F.D.A. and together they go on various adventures fighting secret gangs and investigating other mysteries. Tony also falls in love with Amelia Mintz, who is a food columnist and also a saboscrivner, which means she can describe food so accurately that her readers have the actual sensation of tasting the meals she writes about. As with Tony’s cibopathic abilities, this is a kind of superpower in the Chewiverse.

It’s nutty, very gross, and lots of fun. The best thing about it though is Guillory’s art, which is a buffet of caricature figures (Savoy’s tank-like torso and spindle legs being the prime example) and bone-crushing action. I actually slowed down to enjoy the different elements in the many fight scenes, they were so good. Guillory’s art is the perfect complement to the weird world Layman conjured, and had me feeling both full at the end and looking forward to more.

Graphicalex

25 thoughts on “Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice”

    • Haven’t read Necroscope. Looked it up on Wikipedia and from the looks of it I’d say this is zanier and funnier. There’s no real horror here, just gross-out stuff that’s played for laughs. Plus the cibopaths don’t speak to the dead they taste but just have flashes of their back story, which is the same for anything they eat, like fruits and vegetables.

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      • I started the first book and gave up after a hundred pages or so. But the guy goes digging in the innards of a dead man and learns everything about him, and that was the connection I was making. I’m afraid I’m not into anything that involves playing with food. I don’t even like the glutton bit in The Meaning of Life.

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