Here’s a preview of Chew #17, on sale 02/03/2011. What a surprise, it’s another brilliant issue.

If you don’t know the premise of Chew, it’s quite awesome. For various reasons (some a mystery) chicken has been made illegal and Tony Chu works for a police agency that enforces this foul prohibition (ha!). He’s a cibopath, which means he gets psychic readings from eating things, if he ate an apple he’d know what kind of pesticides were used, where it was grown etc. Of course this means Tony can get a real insight into how people have died, though it does mean eating a finger or two (which crops up in the book).

One of the great and individual things about the book is all the jokes in the background. Artist Rob Guillory puts so much into the panels, you find yourself looking at each page like it’s a Where’s Wally? One scene in #17 shows a Home Economics classroom, and on several different background locations it reads:

Baking should not lead to head trauma
Urine is not an ingredient
Mrs cranberry has raspberry farts
Sex Ed: Special guest is Britney Spears!

And there’s so much more stuff like that, it’s just packed full of jokes.

At it’s heart, Chew is like a ‘buddy’ movie, in a Lethal Weapon / Rush Hour style. Two law enforcement agents who shouldn’t get on… do. I think because of all of the craziness in the comic, it’s important to have that basis, and it works. It’s also where a lot of the heart comes from, and there’s a surprising amount of heart in Chew. Even though they make light of incredibly violent scenarios and it seems to have a cynical world view, the relationships that count are incredibly well written and fleshed out nicely.

From the start, Chew has taken these insane ideas and just kept on building upon them, it’s light hearted, gory, enthralling and incredibly funny. With issue #17, the writer John Layman is starting to sink his teeth into the universe he’s just created, he hasn’t done all this work with setting up the premise just to get lazy and stick to a formula for each issue. The latest story arc makes me feel Chew is going to start getting really interesting.

Joe Innes.