‘Chu #1’ Serves Up Some Hot and Spicy in this Spin-Off: A Review

Writer: John Layman / Artist: Dan Boultwood / Image This was a highly anticipated series for me a couple months and prompted me to recommend Chew, a story about a cop with cibopathy (the ability to see the history of anything he’s eaten. Yes, anything) and the fact that the story very much hits differently in 2020 for a laundry list of reasons. But Chew is one of the first collections of comics I ever acquired when I first became an avid reader and there was definitely a smile on my face when I opened Chu #1, with a slightly different artistic styling, but the same off brand food related humor and it definitely felt like coming home.

It’s important to note that Chu isn’t a sequel, but a spin-off, a side story set in the same universe just with the spotlight on Saffron Chu, Tony Chu’s sister who also happens to be a notorious criminal with another food related superpower (it runs in the family). As a protagonist, Saffron very much stands diametrically opposed to Tony’s by the book approach with a very laissez-faire attitude, although you can definitely tell that they are siblings given how they approach food, interpersonal relationships, and familial ones. Saffron’s new to us as the reader, but her personality and presence very much fits within the greater Chew-verse and the fact that we get to see food-related crimes from the perspectives of crimes bosses and thieves is kinda great. It’s bombastic and fun, and Layman’s off brand humor shines through. Boultwood’s art meshes w…