"When I was growing up, in the 80's, everyone wanted to do their Cerebus and not many people pulled it off," Chew creator, John Layman said, referring to Dave Sim's exceptionally long-running, independent fantasy series about an ill-tempered aardvark. "This is the closest thing to my Cerebus, which is a finite series, that if I'm not known for anything else ever, that's fine."
Chew, which is illustrated by Rob Guillory, is set in a world where a bird flu outbreak has caused the government to outlaw chicken, resulting in the F.D.A. wielding a similar amount of power as our real-life, post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security. Chew tells the story of Tony Chu, a detective who is able to get psychic imprints from foods, also known as being a cibopath. "He goes to crime scenes and eats dead bodies and figures out who the killer is," Layman said. In the first volume of the popular Image Comics series, Chu is recruited to work for the F.D.A. after nabbing and chomping a serial killer. "He's pursuing a chicken kingpin when he eats some soup that a serial killer prepared and cut himself in and it's laced with his victims, and he's able to get the impressions and figures this out," Layman said. "The first volume, 'Tasters' Choice' is him learning the ropes in the F.D.A."
Layman shares a true collaborative partnership with artist Rob Guillory. Guillory draws and colors while Layman writes and letters. "I really like the simplicity of this being a complete two-man operation," he said. "I specifically wanted an artist who would make gross things fun. It would've been an ugly book with a different artist. There's people eating people and people eating disgusting things and when I describe it, I'm always, 'Wow this is a really horrible sounding book,' but we try to make it fun, and Rob's art really brings a lot to it."
Since Chew is such a small and personal production process, Layman and Guillory are free to experiment with different production and release strategies. "Just for fun, because I've written it and Chew is very mapped out as a 60 issue maxi-series, I wrote issue 27, just because the story was in my head and I thought, 'Let's do it, let's put it out.' So as a reward for the floppy readers, after issue 18, we're going to jump ahead...and publish 27, and then publish 19 and 20. For the people who buy the monthly, they get to jump ahead and see where things are at." In addition to this unorthodox publishing schedule, Layman, Guillory and Image also created a poster for the series' issue 15 as a form of gratitude to loyal readers, while keeping the price at a low $2.99. "So every 15 issues we want to do a little love letter so we're talking about a glow-in-the-dark cover..." But that's not it, Layman is even looking into what may just be a first in the comic book industry, a scratch-n-sniff cover! "I would love to have a cover that you scratch and sniff and it smells like fried chicken or hot wings or something like that," he said with a grin.
Chew #16 hits stores Wednesday December 22!
Read a preview of Chew #16 right here!
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