Sunday 30 January 2011

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming...

*UPDATE Friday 4th February, 2010* Due to me being a massive girly person and giving into a crappy cold, the next blog post will be up after the weekend.


First of all, thank you to all and anyone who has been reading this blog.

Secondly, apologies that there has been very little this month. My day job has, unfortunately, been providing me with lots of work. It's like they actually expect me to do stuff...

However, all being well, there will be a new blog post by the end of this week (before Friday, I hope). With that said, I will now crack on by entering a disturbing world of Gothic horror and Feminism...

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Chew – Volume 1: Taster’s Choice by John Layman & Rob Guillory

Imagine you could bite into an apple and instantly know where that fruit had come from, who had picked it and how the pickers had transported it to the store. A person could spend a lifetime fascinated by the stories their food could tell. Now imagine that you don’t just get to experience the good stuff. Imagine that when you chomped into a burger, you would get to relive the final moments of that cow as an abattoir worker butchers it, or experience the sensation of your bones breaking from rapid growth when you chow down on a broiler farm chicken breast.

In Chew, this unappealing possibility is one Tony Chu, a Philadelphia cop, faces on a daily basis. Chu doesn’t know to begin with, but he is a Cibopath. This means that he is able to obtain psychic images from everything he eats. As a not-so-normal person, this causes problems with eating anything other than beetroots (a food that, for some reason, does not force terrible visions and scenes upon Chu). Because of this curse, he has never completely enjoyed a typical meal in his life.

There are other issues to contend with, however. Chu lives in a world where a deadly bird-flu epidemic means a government ban on all chicken and bird meats. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are generally responsible for keeping an eye on such breaches, but this duty also falls to others. For example, Tony Chu and his partner have a job to do: bust anyone buying black-market foods. Those who break the law just want to eat real chicken again, but there are also protesting radicals who believe the ban of bird-meat is part of some government conspiracy.

Unbeknownst to Chu until a revelatory stakeout, ingestion of human blood or flesh allows him to see the name and actions of the person it came from. One minute Chu is sitting down for some soup; in the next, he’s making a life-changing arrest which will see him moving to the FDA as an agent and unwilling part-time cannibal.

Yes, that’s right, a cannibal. You see, the specific way the FDA wish to utilise Chu’s talents is in having him chew on body parts to identify how crimes were committed, be they a decomposing finger or a recently deceased dog.

At this point, I imagine you may be thinking, “A Cibopath? Who eats human flesh or blood to help find criminals? All whilst tracking down the black-market sale of poultry? Ok then…” However, this would ignore greatly the dark humour and abundance of imagination that come from the world created by Layman. For one, the idea of a prohibition upon certain foods is deeply satirical, referring back to the prohibition of alcohol (the “chicken speakeasy” is an amusing corruption of the 1920s underground bars) as well as the modern-day crusade to ban some foods because they are dangerous to public health. After all, as recently as March 2010, New York politicians were advocating a ban of salt in restaurant recipes, complete with a $600 fine.

As for originality, there are few graphic novels around brave enough to run with such a risky premise (Layman even acknowledges this in the Dedications). The idea of making your main hero a man forced to cannibalise human flesh as part of an investigative job and then making it funny is, as far as comic books go, still pushing it.

That’s part of the beauty of this comic. It is wise enough to acknowledge the darkness of its story, whilst not taking itself seriously. An indicator of this would be the fact that all of the characters’ surnames have something to do with food or eating, from Mason Savoy, the elder Cibopath in the FDA, to Amelia Mintz, the restaurant columnist capable of writing reviews that allow the reader to experience clearly the meals she describes. You can only imagine the results when she chooses to write about rancid and foul-tasting food.

The story is, of course, one thing, but this darkness and humour are brilliantly conveyed in the comic’s art style. The most fundamental thing to understand about comic books is that, much like cinema, the look and the story must both work in order to create a success. They must both fit and not detract from one another in order for the reader to enjoy the experience. Rob Guillory manages to ensure the reader sees the right atmosphere all the way through the book, as well as creating some arresting visual images. If you would like an example of how powerful an image can be, I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to eat a burger any time soon without checking for unwelcome “extras”.

Guillory also achieves what all great illustrators can do – convey the personality of the character through their physical features. If an illustrator misjudges it, you can end up forgetting the traits of a character as he or she becomes interchangeable with others. In Chew, however, the characters are distinct and their appearances telling.

Chew: Taster’s Choice is the first collected volume – there are two more out there – so it’s hard to tell whether the story arc will sustain itself. However, the story and the art style are so inviting that I’ll be buying the next collection fairly soon. Whether you will find this comic appealing is another matter. This is not the book for you if you want a “normal” story, but that’s not what comic books are generally about. They’re about taking very human stories and placing them in fantastical and imaginative situations, often to devastating effect. The plot is a little unusual if you are used to reading straight-faced “dark” comics, but if you have ever read anything by Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis, you will already be familiar with the notion that serious books do not always have to wrap themselves in purely grim ideas or images. With Chew, the tongue is very firmly in cheek, though who the tongue belongs to is anyone’s guess.


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