Chew #23

Written by John Layman
Art by Rob Guillory

Only John Layman could come up with a plot as twisted as the one that sportswriter Don Frank has concocted in this issue of Chew.  We know Don as the former boyfriend of Amelia Nitz, Tony Chu's girlfriend.  Last issue, he and a group of his friends kidnapped Tony, and the reason is brilliant.

You see, Tony's a cibopath - when he eats something, he learns its entire history.  Don wants to write a book about the sex lives of famous dead baseball players, and he's realized that, were he to exhume the bodies of Babe Ruth and his contemporaries, and force-feed them to Tony, he'd be set.  So simple, it's amazing no one's ever thought of it before, right?

So, while Tony is being held captive, and his daughter is missing, we also get to check in on his former partner, Colby, who has been reassigned to the USDA.  We've seen this government agency in this comic before - USDA agents are partnered with animals, so Colby's is now working with Agent Buttercup, a lion.  His career trajectory is taking a similar path to Tony's at the FDA, as his superior clearly has it out for him.  Of course, Colby has a way of dealing with people...

As always, this book is wickedly funny.  Layman and Guillory are the Brubaker and Phillips of food-based comic science fiction.