Comic Book's Cannibal Cop Takes a Bite Outta Crime
Cannibals, cops, bird flu: All three of these things have grabbed headlines before, but probably not simultaneously. That's where comic book creator John Layman comes in. His runaway hit series Chew follows the adventures of Tony Chu, a detective turned FDA agent who lives in a world where chicken meat was outlawed by Big Brother after a bird flu scare.
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| John Layman's awesome Chew series: Not what McGruff The Crime Dog had in mind when he said, "Take a Bite Out of Crime." |
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| Sucks for Colonel Sanders. |
We caught up with Layman at a signing this past Saturday evening at Atomic Comics' Chandler location and picked his brain about Chew.
More from Layman -- and an illegal chicken eating contest!! -- after the jump.
Layman chatted with fans and signed their copies of the Chew series or his other published comics, including issues of Xena and Marvel Zombies and the hilarious Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen. The folks at Atomic Comics also came up with a wacky "Are You a Cibopath?" game. Thankfully, there were no corpses to taste test; just six types of fried chicken carcasses from the neighboring Buffalo Wild Wings.
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The deal: Eat one of each boneless wing type and guess the sauce. The contestant with the most correct guesses would take home a signed Chew #1. Sweeet!
Three men and one brave woman sampled the fare in Atomic's "Chicken Speakeasy." There were a few tears shed after the Mango Habanero flavor, but at least Atomic's staff didn't pick up the Suicide Wings.
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Three lucky contestants scored 6 out of 6 on the wing tasting/eating contest, making it a tie. But there was only one first issue to go around. So the three battled it out via comic book related questions posed by Layman.
Winner Brian Stupski (right) poses with Chew's creator.
We posed a few questions of our own to Layman, though they seemed a lot easier to answer than his stumpers.
NT: How did you come up with the idea for Chew?
JL: No idea. I'd been pitching it for so long that I can't remember. I pitched it to like seven Vertigo editors. Everyone knew I was working on this weird cannibal/bird flu book and they were like 'yeah, whatever, good luck.' I had this psychic detective idea and this prohibition/bird flu idea, and I realized they were both based around food.
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