Food for Thought
Chew #9
Tony Chu is a secret agent for the FDA with the unusual ability to retrieve pscyhic impressions from anything he eats. He’s traveled to the small island nation of Yamapalu on the trail of a mysterious fruit that tastes just like chicken, but he’s stumbled onto something much bigger, with corrupt cops, corrupt governors, secret conspiracies, and multiple murders. The culprit? Well, Tony takes a few bites out of the corpses in the morgue and finds out that it’s… a vampire? Wait, surely there can’t be vampires in a perfectly logical world of psychic cannibal FDA agents, chicken fruits, cyborg cops, and other normal stuff like that, right? Well, the vampire is planning to attack the governor’s compound. No problem for Tony, right? Nope, his brother, a famous but disgraced chef, is there. The girl he loves, an impossibly talented food writer, is there. And there’s another chef, a guy who communicates entirely through cooking, is there, too. Can Tony save them all in time?
Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m really enjoying this, ’cause we’ve got all these wonderful oddball characters, all thrown into the mix together. It’s a lot like a stew — a really weird cannibal-cyborg-vampire-tropical-cop-foodie stew. Aaaaand I think I’ve hopelessly killed the metaphor, so let’s move along.
Wonder Woman #41
A bunch of evil mind-controlling schoolboys have turned Power Girl against Wonder Woman. There’s quite a bit of slugfesting that goes on before Wondy is finally able to break PeeGee free of the spell, and then they’ve got a couple problems to worry about — Power Girl has to try to be diplomatic and convince a whole lot of people not to riot and kill each other, and Wondy has to track down the evil schoolkids, resist their spells, and dish out a proper punishment. And is anyone going to be able to save Etta Candy and Steve Trevor from killing themselves?
Verdict: Thumbs up. A pretty good slugfest combined with good characterization for both Wondy and Power Girl. We also get a nice moment with Achilles at the beginning and a neat callback for anyone who remembers their history of the Trojan War…