Chew #43 Review (John Layman, Rob Guillory)

Tony’s been sent to the Antarctic to investigate the death of a penguin - and the cigar-smoking, anchor-tattooed snowman is looking mighty suspicious! Now that he’s out of the picture, his daughter, Olive, goes on her first big mission with Mason Savoy (Tony’s former partner and now mentor to his daughter), John Colby and Poyo the cybernetic luchador chicken. They’re looking for information on the vampire Collector - and the trail leads to a Russian cake maker’s shop! 


My problems with this arc, Chicken Tenders, so far have been about the repetitious nature of the story, so the good news is that that’s done with for now (discounting the obligatory Poyo double splash-page - this time he’s fighting the EscarGoat of France!). This issue instead is just sloooooow. 

The whole point of it is so that the reader knows Olive can kick ass. That’s it basically. She can kick ass and is then pointed in the direction of the vampire Collector for a fight in the next issue (that doesn’t look like it’ll go down well). That’s fine but I feel like that stuff could’ve been dealt with way faster than spending an entire issue on it. As it is, the issue itself is just blah. 

There are three covers each with a cut-away section of Olive, Colby and Poyo, so I guess if some readers were inclined, they could cut up the covers and make some new faces or something? Are there readers who do that? There are numerous panels explaining how Olive inherited her dad’s cibopathic powers and then some, hence her current level of awesomeness, but, at this point with issue 43, all readers should already know this, so it feels pointless going over that information again. 

I guess it’s nice seeing Mason in the comics again, and Poyo’s a blast as always, but the whole issue I kept waiting for something to make me sit up and pay attention, and all I got was a whole bunch of nothin’. Standard Chew stuff. Strong art from Rob Guillory, appropriately whacky food bad guys, photoshopped male bodybuilders with Robert Kirkman heads, Poyo, that’s it. 

Chew #43 isn’t a bad issue, it’s just a bridge issue that sets up the bigger conflict of the arc and, like most bridge issues, it’s a bit unsatisfactory by itself. Maybe things’ll take off in the next issue but so far this Chicken Tenders is the weakest storyline in the whole series so far.

Chew #43