A few months back on the Big Shiny Podcast, regular guest and super best friend of BSR!, Kiley, introduced a comic he is currently enjoying quite a bit: Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory from Image.
Well, it looks like he wasn’t the only one that enjoyed it. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Stephen Hopkins, the director of Predator 2 has come on board to direct the cable television adaptation of the series. Circle of Confusion, which is close to releasing it’s first production on AMC, The Walking Dead, also adapted from a comic book series, is producing the series (and on a side note, they are also working on adapting Brian Michael Bendis’ Powers comic book series into a television series on FX as well). No word yet on if any station is interested in picking it up, but I imagine that will come a bit later down the road.
“There are a lot of superhero comic books but there are not many food comic books,” Layman said. “Food turned out to be a very universal theme embraced by readers.” For Layman, who has been writing comic books since 1995, this marks his first original creation and his first success. “It only took 15 years,” he quipped. Layman is celebrating another anniversary this year – he is heading to Comic-Con for the 20th consecutive year, and this time, he will have a table for Chew following the success of the series’ first two volumes.
Chew follows the story of Detective Tony Chu who is a “cibopath” – meaning he gets psychic impressions from anything he eats – which means he mostly sticks to a diet of canned beets. His psychic skills come in handy in solving murders, but this of course means he has to gnaw on the victims to be effective.
While I personally haven’t read Chew, Kiley had great things to say about the comic. It’s great to see Circle of Confusion and television companies jumping on board and adapting some great comic book titles to TV series. Powers, The Walking Dead, and from what I hear about it, Chew, could possibly all make for great television. We will find out this October when the first of these series, The Walking Dead, hit the airwaves on AMC.