Chew: Omnivore Edition, Volume 1

Taster's Choice and International Flavor
written by John Layman
art by Rob Guillory

Bold premise #1:  Protagonist is a law enforcement officer who gets psychic sensations from and about whatever he ingests—a so-called "cibopath"—and he uses this "talent" to solve crimes.  Often by cannibalizing victims and/or perpetrators, or sometimes their dead dogs.

Bold premise #2:  His partner, after being hit in the face with a butcher's knife chasing a serial-killer sous-chef, is rebuilt with half a cyborg face, complete with internal computer and laser eye.

Bold premise #3:  The world has suffered a catastrophic pandemic of bird flu that killed 23 million Americans, 116 million worldwide, leading most nations to institute a poultry prohibition.  Many, however, believe the flu to be a hoax and the prohibition to be a cover-up.

Bold premise #4:  In the wake of this disaster, a strange maybe-fruit seemingly from space, but tasting just like chicken, appears to fill the market demand.  This may or may not have something to do with a mysterious (and hedonistic) international space observatory tasked with studying a single planet.

Tony Chu's world would be oppressively bleak if it weren't so damn whimsical.  Don't get me wrong, Tony Chu suffers.  The only thing he can eat that doesn't assault him with psychic residue is beets.  Beets!  His job, which he's quite good at though his boss is nothing but caustic and bullying, requires that he regularly ingest dead people.  And those are the good days, since his boss also goes out of his way to assign Tony the most repellent cases.  But Layman and Guillory have cooked up a world so vibrant and absurd that even the macabre has a tone of glee.

Taster's Choice introduces the seedy underbelly of a post-pandemic city, complete with black-market poultry mobs, corrupt and licentious politicians, a commensurately empowered F.D.A., now the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, and food terrorist organizations, believing the bird flu and poultry prohibitions to be little more than government conspiracy.  While each chapter bears some plot connection to those around it—and some resurface as exceedingly important in later arcs—Taster's Choice is primarily a story about the brief, but educational, partnership between rookie F.D.A. agent Tony Chu, formerly of the Philadelphia police department, and Mason Savoy, his powerful but portly mentor with a penchant for Victorian turns of circumlocution.

On the other hand, International Flavor immerses Tony into an international plot by a small island nation Yamapalu and its petite, bug-eyed governor to launch the gallsberry—a mysterious space fruit that tastes like chicken—into international cuisine, and he's kidnapping the world's most respected food experts, including chefs (like Tony's brother Chow) and food critics (like Amelia Mintz, a saboscrivener and Tony's crush), to make it happen.  There are multiple conspiracies, and Layman's constantly juggling a handful of storylines at once, but he never lets them drop.  The poultry muscle, primarly a mercenary named Caesar in the employ of faux-poultry tycoon Ray Jack Montero, is attempting to sabotage Yamapalu's governor and his emerging gallsberry industry; Chu is tracking down the space-fruit, but gets sidetracked chasing down a local murder over a prize cyborg gamecock named Poyo for the local fuzz, who ends up stealing him anyway; and one of the governor's kidnapped chefs, mute cibolocutor Fantanyeros, is rescued in a multi-front assault by the ominously named Vampire.

Cibopath: someone who feels a psychic sensation about whatever he or she ingests, except beets.

Saboscrivener: someone who can write about food so accurately and vividly that it conveys the sense of taste to whomever reads it.

Cibolocutor: someone who can communicate through food.

Collects Chew #1-10

ISBN:  978-1607062936