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.
Alex Good 
make sure you have a bottle of bbq sauce on hand when you read the next volume. Might need to snack on some finger foods, hahahahahaaha.
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I wonder if too much BBQ sauce would scramble up his receptors. But most of the time he’s just eating raw foods . . .
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Eating corpses, that can’t be healthy…
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You would think not, but they’re corpses that have died a violent death, not from disease or poison. Plus he only needs a taste.
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That’s what the cannibal says to ALL the people he eats!
You watch, this comic is going to turn that character into a cannibal and then that universes version of batman will show up and eat him. Poetic justice…
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Poetic justice or . . . just desserts. Which is actually the title of volume 3.
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Oh man, did I walk into that one!
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It’s early.
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That’s not enough of an excuse on the weekend, not for me anyway.
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That’s a concept I haven’t heard of before. Looking forward to the reviews on this.
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I haven’t finished it yet, but the next few volumes are great. It’s a well thought out series and I’m really enjoying it.
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Im re- reading Murderbot – it’s a TV series on Apple now and they’ve messed with it a bit so I’m going back to the source to make sure I’m not sullied by it!
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Good call!
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I saw that they’d adapted it. I heard it was pretty good. Let me know what you think. Even though if it’s on Apple I’ll probably never see it.
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Only done the first episode so far, at least they’ve chosen well with the actor playing Murderbot. I’ve read a few fan comments on it – they’re not happy, but that’s always the way with purists. Phil watched it with me – he hasn’t read the books – and thought it was good. Too soon for me to give a proper opinion.
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Ah, carry on then!
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Will do. Have you been off to see the King?
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It’s a measure of how little I care that I spent almost a full minute looking at this comment trying to figure out what you were talking about.
No, haven’t been to see the king. Some day I’ll post the picture I took when I was a wee lad of his mom though, when we got pulled over so she could drive by in her limo on some back road in Blighty. The year would have been ’76.
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Off with your head! 👸🤣
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Not a bad way to go, all things considered.
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Hah! I suppose there’s worse ways.
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This sounds like the food version of the Necroscope series……????
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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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I’m sure this isn’t for you then! Though it is really interesting the way it weaves different plot threads together as it goes along.
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