Blue Plate Special

The most unexpected dose of fun this week came in a single comic book — or rather, two comic books crammed into one. Chew/Revival and Revival/Chew were two complete stories combined into one awesome flipbook. Let’s take a look at the menu…

Chew/Revival #1

So in the comic written by John Layman and illustrated by Rob Guillory — the guys behind “Chew” — Tony Chu, the FDA detective who gets psychic impressions from everything he eats, pays a visit to Wausau, Wisconsin with his partner, the cyborg John Colby. They’re investigating… something about a chopped-off hand? For some reason, that just led them to the Reviver capital of the world. That leads them to a morgue full of dismembered corpses and a recently sewn-together reviver, and then to a local chef with an extra arm.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a severely weird story, and it often doesn’t make a lick of sense. But it does everything that a “Chew” story should do — it delivers funny, morbid, slapstick weirdness, and that’s a good thing.

Revival/Chew #1

And on the other side, with Tim Seeley and Mike Norton handling the creator chores, John Chu is in Wausau on a different case — helping investigate some grave robberies. Chu is along on this one because many people think reviver parts could grant immortality to anyone who eats them. And Chu’s investigation leads to some weird stuff. He eats a little snow — and discovers that the ghosty-aliens around the county are actually human souls. And snacking on one stray fingernail leads to the discovery that someone is digging up all their old friends and holding a barn dance. When Chu, Dana, and Ibrahim investigate the barn, they find a grisly waltz featuring a bunch of bloody, stitched-together corpses.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Much more serious than the other story — and magnificently bloody and scary. Plus it features the epic crossover of Poyo the cyber-chicken from “Chew” with Lying Cat from “Saga.” Definitely worth the price.

Again, folks, that’s two excellent comics, slightly less than full-length, all in one package, for just five dollars. Go grab it, kids.

Today’s Cool Links:

• To think — we could’ve had the brilliant Edgar Wright making a superhero movie for us — and Marvel went and pulled a DC Comics on us.
• There’s a Kickstarter to bring “Reading Rainbow” back. I don’t even have kids, and I kinda want to back that one.
• On a much more serious note: Basically, these people sit around all day and talk about their plans to write manifestos and kill as many people as they can. For some reason, no one calls this terrorism, and no one arrests these people making plans to commit terrorist attacks. Because they’re mostly white guys. And the people they hate with such endless, demented fervor is women.