Aside from Unwritten, the other new first-graphic-novel-in-a-series that I have been loaned is Chew, about a police detective afflicted with cibopathy. In the extremely likely event that this term means nothing to you, I’ll tell you something similar to what the second page of the first issue tells you: apparently, there are people who place food (or whatever) in their mouths, and the act of ingesting gives them psychic information from whatever it was they ate. Like, if it’s an apple, they’ll know things about the harvest grove and the local pesticides, or if it’s a burger, they’ll know things about the cow’s life and probably its violent demise, or, well, if it’s a person… you could learn all kinds of things, couldn’t you?

Against this potentially cannibalistic premise[1], we have the life of poor, sad Tony Chu, who to add insult to injury can only eat beets if he wants to avoid getting psychic backwash. He is a cop, tasked with enforcing the federal edict outlawing chicken. And trust me, the drug war metaphors are so thinly veiled that I spent the first couple of issues feeling insulted that someone would choose so facile a soapbox to preach from. But then things got more and more bizarre, and while I can, as of the end of the first book (Taster’s Choice), accept that there’s actually something going on behind the whole bird flu / outlawed chickens thing[2], I also can’t make up my mind if I care. It looks like everything that has happened is important, but almost none of it seemed connected, each piece to another, in this particular book. And when my main character hates his life this much and the plot is this disjointed, it’s hard to find something to grasp onto to bring me back for a second book.

We’ll see, I guess?

[1] Spoiler alert: yep.
[2] Not to mention some justification for it, instead of just “not drugs, lol, chickens” like I really believed was going on at first.