Chew Volume Four: Flambé

Are things coming together, or breaking further apart? I’m not sure. The previous Chew volume, Just Desserts, ended with strange letters in flames being written in the sky, presumably by aliens. In this book a couple of people seem to have a vision of what the letters mean, but one of them is a voresoph – someone capable of superhuman mental feats after consuming vast quantities of food (so the more he eats, the smarter he gets) – and he basically eats himself to death, while the other is the mysterious Mason Savoy, and at this point in the story nobody knows what he’s up to.

Some old characters are back doing their thing, like Poyo the killer cockerel, the busty lethal ladies of the USDA, and the murderous Vampire, while we’re finding out more about others, such as the fact that Tony’s sister, Toni, as well as his daughter Olive, are cibopaths as well. One very fringe figure comes back from an earlier comic, reborn as the high priestess of a chicken cult, while other characters that were fairly central (Tony’s girlfriend Amelia Mintz and Ray Jack Montero, the guy who was trying to make frogs taste like chicken) are MIA.

In short, more weirdness. But I liked it and respected that it felt like Layman and Guillory were still stretching the limits of what they could do with all this.

Graphicalex