Chew, Vol. 8: Family Recipes by John Layman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hmm.
Okay, let’s just get into the problem I have here. Keeping in mind that these are great comics and the art is so stylish and individual to Rob Guillory, and I fucking love that aspect of it.
I also love that this series seems to be building to something big, but the sad part is that sometimes you get these tweeners. The books where they kind of come down from the last big thing and then rev up for the next big thing. Maybe it’s a necessary storytelling element, but I could do without.
Alright, that’s out of the way.
Futurecasting. I don’t really like fortune-telling stories. Because, basically, that implies that time travel is possible, right?
I’m just thinking here, but telling the future is time travel, just without moving your BODY, right? It’s moving your perception forward while your body stays stationary? Which is probably better than real time travel. I’d be happy to just watch some stuff and not actually have to BE there. Abraham Lincoln slept in the same bed with this other dude because he was a broke-ass lawyer, and it was a joyous occasion to come home after the other dude had banged a prostitute because the bed was warm. That’s real. That’s Abraham Lincoln. Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln Douglas Debate Lincoln. Daniel Day Lewis Lincoln. Tall guy with even taller hat Lincoln. He’s on almost all the money. This is what his life was like, the body heat of a prostitute and a roomie in the mattress was a banner day. I’m Pete. I haven’t freed shit. I’m 1/2 an inch shorter than Pee Wee Herman. The only way Daniel Day Lewis is going to play me in a movie is if my life takes a big fucking turn. Like huge. Where I have to be killed by detonating a volcano because I’ve just become too powerful to be killed otherwise. And, just being honest, I don’t love it when I sit on a toilet seat and there’s unexpected warmth in there. Not in love with that. So if I could just SEE some of that old stuff, that’d be better, right?
Anyway, I don’t think I need to beat to death my feelings on time travel. But I’ll just give them a light slaparound.
Time travel is what comes at the bottom of the well when the well runs dry and then you lower yourself down in there on some scary bucket and start digging the well deeper. Then a scary Ring girl comes out of fucking nowhere, but except for being scary, it’s really not that bad because she’s like 8 years old and you have a shovel, and frankly she can barely see with all her hair down over her face. So you murder a child who may or may not be already dead, you justify burying her corpse using the logic from the last sentence, and then you dig even deeper where you tap into time travel.
I’m saying that time travel is beyond scary ghost level in terms of having been done a couple times, and this book actually uses ghost level to GET TO time travel. Oh, and we use a drug trip to access the ghost to access the time travel. That’s a lot of layers of things that I don’t care for in a story. That’s a goddamn lasagna of stuff that doesn’t work too well for me. Mushroom tripping layered with ghosts, all stuffed with futurecasting.
Don’t get me wrong. Lots of shit about this book is unbelievable. That’s what I like about it, and I like that the unbelievable stuff is new and different. The FDA becomes an ass-kicking organization that rids the world of contraband poultry? Sold. NASA is still a real thing that can do stuff? It’s probably a little wish fulfillment for me, but good enough.
It’s just that I have such high expectations of this book in terms of novelty and keeping it interesting, and this particular volume missed the mark just a bit.