10: Chew Volume Three: Just Desserts, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (2010 paperback)

I remember reading comics as a girl--mainly Archie, Richie Rich, and the like. We rarely bought them in my household, but I'd read them at friends' houses or encounter them in the library. Then, for a good 25 or so years, I never thought much about comics: they were for kids, or guys, or geeks.  Five or six years ago, though, the California Association of Teachers of English selected Persepolis--a graphic novel depicting the author's girlhood during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War--and reintroduced me to the idea of graphic texts.  I found the format compelling and was challenged by the effort to retrain myself as a reader--searching visual texts for meaning to supplement the written words.  It seemed a good skill to introduce my students to, and I used Persepolis for two years in my developmental English classroom with great success: students who never would have read a traditional text about such a subject loved it, many of them voluntarily going on to read the sequels on their own time.  I started an inquiry into comics in the K-16 classroom, thereafter delivering workshops on the subject at several conferences and integrating a variety of comics and graphic novels into classes whenever possible.

Not one to limit myself to a few "classics" or "scholarly" texts, I started expanding my repertoire into serial comics as well, reading for myself as well as for my classes.  My sister Sarah had gotten into comics a couple years earlier and was in the process of writing a graphic novel, so our interests overlapped: we bought tickets to Comic Con in the summer of 2008 and plunged into the comic world with 100,000 other geeks in the San Diego Convention Center.  It was remarkable, and since then we've returned, this past Spring expanding geekdom to attend APE (a small press comics convention) in San Francisco.

All this is being told to establish the fact that I am a regular comics reader, most likely having one of the best collections of graphic novels and comics in our small community.  (I'm always willing to loan books out, too!)  I pretty much try anything out there, drawing the line only at superhero comics--and mainly because that would open a huge world to explore.  And, there's enough good stuff out there that I can leave the tights and cleft chins alone.  The Chew series, for instance, is a great adult comic for anyone that thinks that a storyline about a law-enforcement officer who works to control people's eating habits it funny.  I am one of those people.

Tony Chu is cibopathic: he need only chew on a piece of food--and in his line of work, all too often, a piece of flesh--to know where it grew, how it was picked or killed, how it was processed, etc.  It's a blessing and a curse, and the poor man eats nothing but beets when left to his own devices.  Unfortunately, he is often called to taste less savory items in his day-to-day life as an agent in the FDA--one of the most important police forces in a world where chicken is illegal after a bout of avian flu that nearly wiped out the human race.  In this third trade, collecting issues 11-15, Chu's ex-partner is running amok in the culinary underground, his current part-robotic partner is up to his usual antics, and Tony's girlfriend--a saboscrivner, who can write about food with such skill that the reader can actually taste it--is sticking around. 

You just don't get cannibals, fricken (artificial chicken), and severed thumbs in enough standard novels these days.  Chew delivers them all with aplomb and humor.