That's Entertainment

A guy I work with suggested I get John Layman and Rob Guillory's Chew since the first several issues have just been released in trade paperback, and so far I'm being quite entertained. Quite entertained indeed. And maybe a little less hungry than usual.

Chew's protagonist is police detective Tony Chu, a poor guy plagued with being a cibopath, which means that he picks up psychic readings from everything he eats. The only exception being beets, which he eats almost exclusively in order to experience the peace of mind that comes from food that doesn't make him nauseous from experiencing too much of its back history. In a not too distant future where a purported bird flu scare made all poultry banned by the United States government, the FDA is now the most important and powerful law-enforcement branch in the country, and they want to hire Tony Chu to put his cibopathic talents to forensic good use.

A pretty good combination of belly laughs (Guillory's art hilarious and continuously fluid) and the occasional squick-factor (the above panel from the comic depicts a scene at the FDA offices where Tony is being talked into eating a rancid human finger found in a fast food hamburger to help determine the name and address of the finger's former owner). Becoming a potential cannibal for the FDA is naturally a horrifying prospect for any sane man. But Tony Chu is also portrayed as a very dedicated and thorough cop, and in a scene where Tony starts devouring the freshly dead corpse of a serial killer to get all of the names of the children that he had murdered, the man doesn't hesitate for an instant. Gratefully (or depending on your own personal threshold for gratuitous gore) we are spared the visual details. But not every scene does spare us, and I think that's an appropriate, even balance.

I just started reading this two days ago, but I am already having a blast. Definitely thinking of following this one regularly.