The chef on a fictional island, who is wrapped up in a scheme to export alien fruit that tastes like chicken was one of them.Īnd this one, an USDA agent named Lin Sae Woo, who looks like this: I’m just disturbed and confused and feel like the story isn’t telling me how I should feel about any of it.Īs for the art, a lot of the characters have this quirky, caricature-like style that I appreciate, but some of them verge on the limit of bigotry. Also, after using the f-word (not fuck! that word is great) it is then implied (er, heavily) that John is queer himself.

I couldn’t decide what the story wanted me to think about either of them. He uses racial and sexual orientation slurs (the f-word, for one), and says to Tony he doesn’t want to get in the car with an Asian driver, but then Tony laughs like he knows it’s not serious? It’s weird.

Mostly it’s to do with the way that Tony’s partner John Colby (now a cyborg after the butcher’s knife to his face in the first volume maimed him) is a bigot. The first volume had this satirical lens that seemed to say that it didn’t approve of the characters much, so I was able to just let the bad behavior and grossness of some characters go, but here it seems like the narrative voice, or whatever, condones the bad behavior? It’s hard to explain. And both these dudes are to blame, in my opinion. So basically there are two things ruining my enjoyment here, and I almost two-starred this, but I want to see what happens and if the series course corrects. 3-5 checked out from the library right now I’ll probably keep going, but with a warier eye now. I don’t know what to think about this series now. Ugh, why you gotta ruin a good thing, John and Rob?* Ugh.

Chew Vol. 3 by John Layman