Chew: The Smorgasbord Edition, Volume 3

Chew #9-12

by John Layman, Rob Guillory (Artist)

Tony Chu is a detective with a secret. A weird secret. Tony Chu is Cibopathic, which means he gets psychic impressions from whatever he eats. It also means he's a hell of a detective, as long as he doesn't mind nibbling on the corpse of a murder victim to figure out whodunit, and why. He's been brought on by the Special Crimes Division of the FDA, the most powerful law enforcement agency on the planet, to investigate their strangest, sickest, and most bizarre cases.
Presenting the third and final CHEW Smorgasbord, a massive, deluxe hardcover featuring the final 20 issues New York Times Best Selling, Harvey and multiple Eisner Award-winning series about cops, crooks, cooks, cannibals, and clairvoyants. Enemies are confronted, mysteries are solved, and the body count rises, so very, very high.
Also included are the blockbuster one-shots featuring everybody’s favorite homicidal rooster, WARRIOR CHICKEN POYO, DEMON CHICKEN POYO, and the dual crossover event, CHEW/REVIVAL and REVIVAL/CHEW.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Comic Book, Graphic Novels Comics

640 pages, Hardcover

Published July 4, 2017

About the author

John Steele Layman is an American comic book writer and letterer. Layman is most known for writing Chew, published by Image Comics.

Reviews

[Akshay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chew: The Smorgasbord Edition, Volume 3 by John Layman

By the time readers reach Chew: The Smorgasbord Edition, Volume 3, the series has fully transformed from grotesque cult comedy into something far more unsettling: a sustained meditation on power, trauma, identity, and survival. This edition does not merely escalate the plot; it recontextualizes everything that came before it. What once felt absurd now feels tragically coherent.

The strength of this volume lies in how confidently it abandons the need to impress with novelty. The food powers, conspiracies, and visual grotesquerie are no longer hooks; they are infrastructure. Layman trusts the reader to engage with the emotional and thematic weight rather than the gimmick. The humor still lands, but it is darker, more acidic, and often uncomfortable because it now cuts directly into character psychology.

Rob Guillory’s art reaches its most expressive form here. Facial distortions, body language, and grotesque food imagery stop functioning as punchlines and begin operating as psychological portraiture. Emotional states are externalized visually: anxiety becomes cramped framing, guilt becomes exaggeration, moral rot becomes literal ugliness. In oversized format, this visual language becomes impossible to ignore.

If earlier editions seduced through shock and momentum, this one grips through emotional inevitability. Every compromise Tony has made, every silence he has tolerated, every act of reluctant obedience now accumulates into a character who feels exhausted rather than merely unlucky. The comedy still entertains, but the underlying experience is one of quiet suffocation.

By Volume 3 of the Smorgasbord editions, Chew stops asking how strange its world is and begins asking how much of yourself you are willing to lose to survive inside it.

📌 Comparative Analysis: Smorgasbord Volume 3 vs Earlier Volumes and Earlier Smorgasbords

The contrast between this edition and the earlier material is stark and revealing.

Vs Early Trade Volumes (1–3)

The early volumes function like concept-driven satire. They are playful, chaotic, and fueled by surprise. By comparison, Smorgasbord Volume 3 feels structurally inevitable. The world no longer feels like a playground for absurdity; it feels like a closed system that slowly grinds people down. What was once episodic now reads as tragic architecture.

Vs Smorgasbord Volume 1

The first Smorgasbord showcases escalation: bigger cases, deeper conspiracies, broader satire. It still retains a sense of narrative curiosity. Volume 3, by contrast, replaces curiosity with fatigue as a deliberate emotional effect. The reader is meant to feel worn down alongside Tony.

Vs Smorgasbord Volume 2

Volume 2 marks the transition toward thematic seriousness. Volume 3 completes that transformation. Where Volume 2 still balances spectacle and reflection, Volume 3 leans decisively toward introspection. The absurdity no longer distracts from the pain; it frames it. The series stops feeling like a satire with depth and begins feeling like a tragedy disguised as comedy.

Shift in Tonal Function

Earlier volumes used grotesque humor to entertain. This edition uses grotesque humor to expose coping mechanisms. Jokes land, but they increasingly function as defense mechanisms for characters and readers alike.

This evolution is what makes Smorgasbord Volume 3 feel like the series’ emotional core. It is not just larger; it is heavier.

📌 Full Psychological Trajectory of Tony Chu Across This Edition

Tony’s arc here is not about transformation in the heroic sense. It is about gradual erosion.

Phase One: Functional Dissociation

At the beginning of this edition, Tony appears competent and efficient. Thematically, this is revealed to be emotional numbness. He is no longer reacting to horror because he has learned not to. This is survival, not strength.

Phase Two: Complicity Awareness

As events unfold, Tony begins to recognize that he is not just trapped within a corrupt system — he is helping sustain it. This realization does not empower him; it destabilizes him. The psychological shift here is from victimhood to guilt-laced awareness.

Phase Three: Fragmented Identity

Tony increasingly struggles to articulate why he does what he does. Duty, fear, habit, inertia, morality — none of these fully explain his behavior anymore. His sense of self begins to fracture. The question becomes not “What should I do?” but “Who am I when I keep doing this?”

Phase Four: Emotional Withdrawal

Interpersonal scenes grow colder. Tony does not explode; he recedes. This is a critical distinction. His trauma manifests not as melodrama but as emotional absence. He becomes harder to reach, harder to read, harder to comfort.

Phase Five: Quiet Existential Horror

By the latter portion of the edition, Tony’s suffering is no longer situational. It is existential. He is haunted not by specific events but by the realization that adaptation has cost him something fundamental. The horror is no longer the world; it is the self he has become inside that world.

What makes this trajectory compelling is its restraint. Layman does not dramatize Tony’s breakdown with spectacle. Instead, it unfolds through repetition, silence, small compromises, and subtle visual cues. The result is a portrayal of psychological decay that feels disturbingly realistic despite the absurd setting.

Tony Chu does not fall apart loudly. He survives quietly. And that is what makes his story so disturbing.

Final Assessment

Chew: The Smorgasbord Edition, Volume 3 is where the series proves its artistic legitimacy beyond genre novelty. It is not simply bigger, funnier, or stranger. It is more honest. It confronts the cost of endurance, the psychology of complicity, and the discomfort of self-awareness with a clarity that many more “serious” comics avoid.

This edition confirms that Chew is not just a satire about food and power. It is a story about what happens when a fundamentally decent person adapts too well to a fundamentally broken world.

[Eric Mesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go to http://www.comicpow.com/2018/03/04/ta... to see the article along with supporting images. This is copied from there.

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When Dan introduced me to Chew it was the odd premise that convinced me to give it a shot. The entertaining introductions to the powers and the prologues that have the reader wondering how it’s going to tie into the issue’s content intrigued me. (As did Guillory’s unique art style) But the biggest point in Chew’s favor was the fact that it had a finite end. Writer John Layman knew it was a 60 issue story and, as he reveals in the third Smorgasbord collection, he knew the ending he wanted right at the beginning. The fact that it would end raised the stakes because it meant no one was safe, no one had to be saved for generations to come. And, as I would discover, the fixed ending allowed Layman to engage in the kind of tight plotting that often eludes the never-ending comics. I’d like to explore this a bit further before delving into Chew’s themes.

It’s axiomatic at this point that death is cheap in comics. When I first got into comics, death was so impermanent that we had the saying “the only permanent deaths are Gwen Stacey, Bucky Barnes, and Uncle Ben.” I’m not up to date on the latest spider-machinations of Dan Slott, but I believe Uncle Ben remains the only one on that list because his death is THE inciting incident that creates Spider-Man the hero (as opposed to Spider-Man the wrestler). I believe at this point the only reason death issues continue to sell is not because readers believe in them anymore, but because they want to see what in-universe loopholes have been used to kill our gods. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that at some point in the last decade I read an issue where Wolverine was burnt to a crisp and his healing factor was able to bring him back. So his death a few years ago had to really involve something special.

We can’t blame Disney or Warner Brothers for this, however. Although there was a time before the Avengers or the X-Men or Superman, we seem to be stuck with these properties. Their proteges are forever stuck as second banana unless the heroes are spending some time dead, as in the case of the storyline in the early 2000s where Dick Grayson was finally able to step up after 40 years thanks to Batman’s death. So the deaths cannot stick because there are new generations of kids who need to have their Bruce Wayne, Scott Summers, etc stories. So we never get satisfying endings, the villains never stay in Arkham, etc. It can be a little tiresome after a while. It also means that you’re always playing with the neighborhood toys. If someone else gets a hold of a character they can undo everything you’ve done. It’s why we have retcons. It’s why things get messy with character histories. It’s why you can’t do tight plotting for more than a story arc’s worth of stories.

Layman is able to hit us a lot harder because these characters are DONE. He knew that was coming and so deaths hurt, especially after Layman has spent so much time building up these characters into real people. Real people in a world with sometimes silly and sometimes deadly serious powers. While there are plenty of indie comics with unending stories, it’s this ability to put a cap on things that has drawn me closer to these and away from mainstream comics.

Because I knew I would be writing an article encompassing the entire sixty-issue run, I went back to the beginning and read all the way through to the end. I’d already read up to Major League Chew, so I had some idea of where things were headed when I picked volume one back up for this re-read in preparation. This time I realized just how tightly Layman had plotted this series. In the first volume, in a torrent of world-building, we see all of the following even if we don’t know the significance for many volumes to come: frogs all over Montero’s office and the fact that Caesar is working for him, the planet with the words over the skies, the “vampire” cibopath, and the possibility that the bird flu was a conspiracy. That last one in particular is a great bit of narrative because we are quite familiar with people who see conspiracies everywhere and would of course just dismiss this as simple world-building. Of course, our first hint that it might be more important is when Savoy, who was introduced as a mentor and source of reason, seems to hint that it might indeed have been a conspiracy.

A very quick synopsis if you are reading this and don’t know what Chew is about: after a deadly bird flu outbreak chicken is outlawed in the United States. The FDA gains an FBI-like police force to combat food and chicken crimes. Just as when we had alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, there are chicken speakeasies where one can eat chicken illegally. Outside of that, the big difference from the real world is that a segment of the population has food-related powers. These powers are all over the place and contribute the humor to what is otherwise a relatively dramatic story. For example, having the power for people to taste any food you write about or learning about the food you eat or being able to craft working weapons from food. Tony Chu, our protagonist works for the FDA police force.

Chew #1 has a publish date of 3 June 2009 and Layman writes at the end of the third Smorgasbord edition that he came to Guillory with the idea in 2008. From 2005-2007 bird flu was making more and more headlines, with an epidemic hitting early 2009. Additionally, the George W. Bush administration was nearing its end as Layman gestated the ideas for Chew. The terror attacks of 2001 had led to a ballooning of government agencies that included beefing up Homeland Security. It went from a relatively obscure agency to absorbing the Secret Service from Treasury where the Secret Service had been situated for about 100 years. Newspapers began (and continue) to report of border agents acting with impunity. And, of course, the 11 September attacks are rivaled only by the Kennedy assassination for conspiracy theories. All of these melded together to form the main themes gluing together a police procedural taking place in a wacky offshoot of our universe. Layman also spoke to what such a government infrastructure might do to the morality of its employees.

The trope of the incorruptible cop paired with one that’s a little loose with morality is nothing new. It’s often been used to cause dramatic tension between officers as well as commenting on the relative merits of each approach. In Chew we have Tony Chu on one side and Savoy/Colby on the other side, each representing a different take on the rule-breaker lawman. It doesn’t matter how much suffering Tony Chu goes through or how much abuse he gets from his boss, Tony Chu is always going to do each mission by the book. He believes in the justice system and doing what’s right. He’s the cop we all say we want until we’re affected and then we want a Batman vigilante instead. John Colby is a Han Solo with a badge type. While his actions are sometimes satisfying to watch and even sometimes a bit more effective in getting information during a case, he abuses his role – especially as he graduates to the FDA and USDA. He flagrantly eats chicken the entire run, even as it becomes his job to enforce the government rules against it. He’s a fun character to watch, but he’s not really want we want in a police officer. Then there’s Maison Savoy. He breaks rules, but not to enrich himself. His wife died during the bird flu epidemic that led to the chicken prohibition so he’s highly interested in figuring out whether there was a conspiracy or if it was just like the Spanish Flu. He’s the rule-breaker for a higher purpose. It’s obvious why Chu would shy away from Colby’s antics, but the reader could certainly be sympathetic with Chew getting on the slippery slope thanks to Savoy. The fact that he doesn’t is a source of tension between them and fuels many aspects of the story past the first volume. In fact, it propels the final story arc that concludes the story. Not only does Chu’s unwavering dedication to following the rules ground the story as everyone around him bends the rules, it also makes the final panel have a really strong impact.

While the bulk of the story involves the effects of the government expansion (FDA and USDA getting FBI/SWAT-like forces), it turns out that the bird flu was indeed a government conspiracy. It was the case of the government fabricating an event in order to gain consensus. There are a few of these throughout history, the inciting ship explosion for the Vietnam War being among them. Rather than explain to the American people that they had decoded a message from the aliens that chicken was doom, they created the death to force the attitude change they wanted. (Interestingly, not too far from the planned calamity in Watchmen). So an overarching theme of the series (both on the surface in the case of the FDA and USDA and as a thread unknown until the end with the conspiracy) is that of the paternalistic state. The government knows what’s right for the citizens and the end always justifies the means. I can’t think of a better way to explore these ideas in the mainstream than through a comic that has the issues woven throughout the background. It keeps the story from being an anvilicious Aesop and allows the ideas to entered unfiltered through the biases of our usual political debates.

There are other great aspects to Chew, including the fact that the protagonist is Asian. There is a distinct lack of Asians in American mainstream comics. Oh, there are a few second-string characters like Karma (Xi’an Coy Manh) of the X-Men, but for the Asian-American comic book fan there aren’t many heroes to see oneself in. And of those, there even fewer who aren’t martial arts masters. In fact, continuing on Layman’s eschewing of Asian stereotypes, there’s the Chu family. One gets the distinct impression that the Chu family has been in America for at least a couple generations, so the family is mostly no-different that the average American family. You can hear about Layman’s reasons for creating an Asian-American protagonist in the interview I conducted with him at the 2016 Baltimore Comic-Con.

I also want to mention that a key part of why Chew works so well is Rob Guillory’s art. It is a caricatured version of the world that retains enough realism to hit the dramatic notes while also being silly enough to make the fantastical elements not feel incongruent. Additionally, Rob’s easter eggs throughout the series serve to both give the world a more lived-in feel (the message boards have actual messages on them! The memos aren’t just scribbled lines!) and give fans something to look for and chuckle about. You can hear about about that in my interview with Rob Guillory from Baltimore Comic-Con 2016.

I don’t know if we’re ever going to return to the days where the major publishers put out comics of every genre – love, crime, teen, western, science fiction, and, yes, Super Heroes. But Layman and Guillory have shown that there is a market out there for something different – for detective procedurals, for Buffy-style storytelling with a bad guy of the trade as well as an over-arcing story, for non-white characters, and for stories that have definite endings. I can’t wait to see what he does next in the indie world.

Long time readers of Comic POW! will also remember back when Dan and I were the main writers, we used to challenge each other to choose an issue from our pull lists to convince the other person was the better issue. You can see those in Week 11: Batman #5 vs Chew #23 and Week 18: Chew #31 vs Saga Chapter Nine.

[Highland G · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a LOT of filler and REALLY DRAGS OUT the ending. Otherwise its the same as the previous volumes, very violent, very simple humour and very rinse and repeat.
I feel this story could have been done great in a 10-15 issue series but instead its a bit of a dragged out mess with no real satisfying conclusions.

[All Things Urban Fantasy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review courtesy of All Things Fantasy

CHEW has never been a book for the weak-stomached. There is no way of getting around the fact that our main character eats the corpses of villains and victims in order to solve crimes. He doesn’t always wait until they are dead, either. It’s twisted, hilarious and heart-breaking all at the same time.

This is the final volume of the SMORGASBORD EDITIONS and the end of the series. I’ve read quite a few issues from the start of the series, but there were enough flashbacks and exposition to catch up anyone picking up this 600 page behemoth.

The series ends with a bang, with beloved characters being axed and food-based super powers of all kinds being exposed. Mashed-potato golems, chocolate swords and gelatin based communication are just the beginning. Each of these powers is named and described in scientific terms, adding to the eloquent and humorous writing style.

One of my favourite parts of this series, apart from the food-powers, is the timing. The story is often told slightly out of order in order to heighten the comedic and dramatic effect. Whether to mislead the reader or to build anticipation for someone’s bottom half being replaced by the body of a robotic horse, glimpses into the past and future fit in really well with the overarching, world-altering, chicken-based story of the end of the world.

If you can stomach the violence and the puns, CHEW is an oddly heartfelt book that will leave you guessing until the final page. Just make sure you avoid poultry.

[Paul Allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another good and final volume of this unusual comic series

This final long volume brings the series to a sad and successful conclusion with plenty of humour, pathos, dead bodies and action. I didn’t really take to the series at first but it’s grown on me and it’s worth a look but only by reading previous volumes. The characters are developed further and the plots move along at a reasonable pace.

[Lukasz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Not happy with the ending and last volumes. It could be tighter and shorter.

[Tresi Fair · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent

[Rory · Rating 5 out of 5]

The miniseries and crossovers included in this volume detracted from the main story for me, but overall the Chew storyline ended beautifully and this was a hugely fun read, with fantastic art as ever from Guillory.