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PANEL
The Online Magazine for Comic Stuff
Chew Show Dead
by Katey Sagal
November 11, 2013
Writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory’s ongoing series “Chew” is a juggernaut. The Image Comics title follows FDA agent Tony Chu, a cibopath who receives psychic information from anything he eats, in a bizarre world where food is at the center of many conflicts, aliens are real and a strange alien fruit tastes like chicken. Launched amidst critical acclaim and strong sales, the book has only picked up steam as it recently reached the halfway point of its planned 60-issue run with legions of fans and a TV option.
The book’s dedicated fanbase was on hand at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo for an action-packed panel about all things “Chew” including the book’s inception, ramping up for the second hald of the series, their favorite moments, and the status of Showtime’s TV option.
“There’s so many other things to complain about on the internet, that there’s really no need for it to be out there,” Guillory said.
“Let me just get this out of the way. The TV show is dead,” Layman told the packed room to an immediate chorus of groans. After signing up veteran TV director Steven Hopkins to helm the pilot and bringing in “Jane Got a Gun” screenwriter Brian Duffield to take a crack at rewriting it, Showtime just couldn’t seem to find a combination that worked.
“[Showtime] started say to try it as an hour series, then a half hour, then throw more sex in, throw in a mother character, let’s take away the bird flu. So it just became really hard to do because on the page, it’s funny when Rob draws Tony eating a corpse, but when its done in live-action, it just doesn’t work the same,” Layman explained. “Showtime was trying the best they could to get the tone right, but it just wasn’t working. On top of all that, they picked up the series when ‘Dexter’ was big, but then they started getting recognition for ‘Homeland’ and it just didn’t fit their overall game plan. We’re just going to do the 60 issues on our own and by then we’ll be unemployed and then do a Kickstarter to make an animation series, on our own terms.”
“The dream goal is to have John script everything, I’ll do all the concept artwork and have Duffield co-script the series,” Guillory chimed in. “Brian wrote a script that was awesome and exactly what we wanted initially for the series and he’s a really big fan of our work. He buys everything Poyo related and he’s really awesome. He’s the only one that got the script right and stayed true to the book.
“We’ve even got a few voice actors that are interested in the project as well. Does anybody know who Phil LaMarr is?” Guillory continued, eliciting cheers for the voice actor best known to comic book fans for his portrayal of Green Lantern John Stewart. “He’s a big ‘Chew’ fan and we’ve been talking to him about lending his voice talents to the series. Another big reason why I’ve been pushing the animation angle is because you cant have Poyo in live-action.”
Layman added, “You cant do Chogs or any other stuff like that.”
“Yeah, you can’t do any of that and it would be cool to have an animated series, along with having 2-3 minute Poyo shorts, which would be totally awesome,” Guillory agreed. “All of this probably won’t happen until around issue #60, when we can totally focus more on it.”
After getting the most disappointing news out of the way, Layman decided to take things back to “Chew’s” origins, which actually stemmed from the avian flu panic that nearly reached a fever pitch in the mid-2000s. “I just thought of the crazy notion that the government would go so far off the rails that they’d outlaw chicken,” Layman began. “It seemed like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch, it’s a funny concept that gets unfunny by the third minute. So that, along with the idea about the cannibal cop, a food writer that wrote so accurately you could taste the food and a whole mess of other ideas. Then it just clicked, it all relates to food and so it became a food book… I never wanted to pitch it to Image, because I was scared they’d say no and they were my last refuge. Then it got to the point where no one was gonna do ‘Chew’ and if I wanted it to get done, I’d have to do it myself.”
“We own the rights, we could put it online but what’s the point. It’s ‘Chew’ without the bird flu and some added sex that there’s no reason for it.”
Layman orignally planned to self-finance five issues before the book proved to be a raging success. Layman was working in video games at the time, working on the Marvel MMO alongside Brian Michael Bendis, which he thought would be a nice in to working for Marvel. When that project was scrapped, the writer decided to take the money he had saved up and fund five issues of “Chew” on his own to prove to editors what he was capable of. He didn’t have an artist at the time, but got in touch with Guillory via Brandon Jerwa, who was writing a Tokyopop book for the artist back in 2008.
“Meanwhile, I was dying on the independent scene,” Guillory said. “I had done a bunch of stuff and I had this thing where I would do work for a publisher, sometimes get paid and other times not, but when it came time for the work to get published, the publisher would die.”
A previous Layman title, “Puffed,” was actually a major inspiration for Guillory based on the art by Dave Crosland, and helped him develop his comedic style on the page. The artist met with Layman at Comic-Con International 2008 after receiving an e-mail from him the night before the con. All he described was a police book, with a cannibal cop, which Layman said he kept vague because he didn’t want to give away everything.