REVIEW- CHU Volume 1 by John Layman + Dan Boultwood

If you're one of my longtime GhettoManga readers, you already know I love John Layman's urban fantasy comic CHEW, about Tony Chu a federal agent who gets psychic impressions from anything he eats.  Laymen returns us to the Chewniverse with CHU, starring Tony's shifty sister Saffron.  Saffron uses her ability to read the thoughts of anyone she eats with to get into gangster shit, and boy does she ever in this CHEW prequel!

The sales pitch:

Collects Issues #1-5

Part 1 of the Chu series

Tony Chu is a cibopath, able to get psychic impressions from what he eats. Saffron Chu is a cibopars, able to learn secrets from who she eats with. Tony is a cop. Saffron is a criminal. They are brother and sister, and they are on a collision course. Spinning out of the Eisner Award-winning and New York Times bestselling series CHEW, comes CHU, a felonious new food-noir about cops, crooks, cooks and clairvoyants.

The story opens on Saffron and her crew planning to jack the #1 gangster in town for his paper. A heist that quickly and spectacularly goes off the rails.  Before long, Saffron is on the run, there is blood in the streets, and Tony is on the case, complete with all the stomach-fluttering hijinks we know and love from CHEW.  

This time around Laymen is joined by a new artist, Dan Boultwood.  As much as I miss Rob Guillory, Boultwood's style is similarly fun, clean, and clear.

Laymen's script does a good job of quickly establishing a baseline persona and status quo for Saffron and gleefully unbalancing it.  The stakes are raised from one chapter to the next, as Saffron's grifting digs her into a deeper and deeper hole.

At first, CHU felt like a CHEW back up story starring Tony Chu's sister, but it quickly revs up and becomes a book about starring Saffron Chu, a super-powered thief whose brother is a super-powered police detective.

peace.

Samax Amen is a professional Content Developer, Illustrator and Cartoonist. He is the artist of many great comics you never heard of like FREELANCER LIFE, Herman Heed, Champion of Children, and The World As You Know It. He even writes and draws his own comics, like Dare: The Adventures of Darius Davidson, Spontaneous, and Manchild when he gets around to it. Because making comics is hard and stuff, he started GhettoManga as a blog in 2006 and as a print magazine in 2008.
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