Rob Guillory + John Layman | Chew
COMIXOLOGY: CONVERSATIONS is an interview-type show with comic book writers, artists, colorists, letterers, storytellers, and just about anyone making or reading amazing books. Portions of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity and you can FIND LINKS TO THE BOOKS MENTIONED HERE. Enjoy our conversation with Rob Guillory + John Layman!
Matt: Kara.
Kara: Matt.
Matt: Welcome back to our podcast pit of despair back here.
Kara: Not despair. It’s a very lovely pit.
Matt: It is lovely. It’s obviously lovely. We have some very special guests.
John Layman: We’ll bring you despair.
Matt: It will come eventually. John Layman and Rob Guillory of CHEW, thanks for coming by.
Rob Guillory: Thank you for pronouncing my name right.
Matt: I do my research, Rob.
Rob: Very good.
Matt: It’s a somber mood right now. CHEW is ten issues away from the end.
John: 11 if you count one more Poyo special.
Matt: I am counting that one. I’m waiting for it with bated breath, but it’s a fascinating thing for me to ask about, because you guys have been doing CHEW for years. It’s one of the longest-running creators owned books that is at the top of the list.
Rob: That’s so weird to think about that.
Matt: Yeah. My question would be, I feel like it’d be mixed emotions for you guys. You’ve been doing it for so long and it’s great, but then you’re like, “OK, it’s got to an end. Let’s see what else I can do.” Is that what you guys feel?
John: Not the “see what else.” I’m just trying to get to the end. It’s like you’re climbing Everest, and what are you going to do once you get to the top? But you still want to get to the top before you look at the next mountain.
That’s what everyone wants to know. It’s what you are doing next. My answer is I don’t want to screw up what I’m doing now.
Kara: That’s fair.
John: I’ve got plenty of time to figure out what I’m doing next.
Rob: It’s very, very bizarre. I’m sure as we get closer to the end, then I start working on the last five issues or something, then it’ll really get sad. But no. We always planned to end it from the very beginning. It’s just crazy that we actually are going to be able to go 60 issues and wrap it the way we want to wrap it.
John: But now, I’m writing an issue, and be like, “Whoa, I’m only using this character one more time,” and each issue is a little bittersweet goodbye. That’s the tough part when you’re writing it. It’s like, “Wow, man. Each one is a little closer to the ending.”
Matt: Will you get to where you just sob at your desk or weep one last time?
Rob: I weep for a lot of reasons, but no. It’s going to be really bizarre.
John: I’ll weep when the paycheck’s come.
Matt: That will be you outside waiting at the mailbox for the guy that delivers the check.
Why do you think you guys have been able to do it? What do you think you guys bring? Or, you can say you’re both legends and you’re both great. But what do you think is the real reason why you guys could do it while maybe some other books couldn’t?
Rob: I don’t know. I think a lot of it had to do with timing. We came out at a time where everyone was…I remember we were there in the middle of event fatigue. There was mostly a lot of crazy Marvel events like Dark Reign, like Secret Invasion.
Matt: Siege.
Rob: All these super serious dark, dark stuff, and we came out in between. There wasn’t an event coming out when we came out, and we were the opposite of super serious. I think that just struck a chord with people, and for whatever reason, it just carried over.
John: We were also the first book that I think was seen as a result of the Kirkman Manifesto. Then when we did really well and Morning Glories is about the same time creators and readers and retailers realized, “Wait, the Kirkman model.” Yes, Walking Dead is far and beyond everything else, but these indie books can gain traction with everybody. 50 issues later, we’ve shown that’s true, but I don’t know why.
Kara: For people who are listening who are not familiar with CHEW, it’s about a detective, Tony Chu, who, when he eats something, can figure out where it’s been and what has happened to it.
Which you’re thinking like, “OK, have some salad. See all the rabbits that also nibbled on it.” But also, he figures out, you nibble on human flesh, maybe dead human flesh, you figure out how that person died, which is great with his detective gig.
I’ve got to tell you, people in the past have told me to read this book, and they pitch it as a detective who’s a cannibal, but he’s not a cannibal. I felt, when I actually started reading, I was like, “This is incredible. Why are people making this very black and white? This is awesome.”
John: One of the challenges we had very early on, because we got dismissed, and they’re like, “This is just a body part of the week. What happens in issue 10 when we’ve run out of body parts?”
What we needed to do was introduce a really big cast, and it had to move to beyond the eating. It became not so much what would he eat this issue but how would he avoid eating it. Now, we’ll go three or four issues without him biting anything.
Then we focus on there’s a big ensemble cast. I think that’s helped keep the book fresh for 50 issues.
Rob: Even the initial solicitation didn’t really do it justice, because it was primarily like “cannibal cop.” It didn’t even talk about the bird flu and chicken prohibition and all this weird sky writing and all this other stuff. The story is surprisingly complex, and it’s not at all just cannibal complement. It’s surprising.
John: But it’s easy to explain it to the people that way and like, “Oh, I’ll check it out.”
Kara: The conspiracy theory aspect, that is not something that I knew about going in. Then within the first 10 pages of the first issue, I’m like, “Oh, there’s some really great world building going on here. This is awesome.” The FDA is the top banana in this world. Where did that idea come from?
John: I was writing this as a reaction to the Bush administration, and it was almost like a satire because I thought, OK, 9/11, the towers went down. Suddenly, the Department of Homeland Security is the most powerful organization. They can stomp all of our rights.
At the same time, there were a lot of swine flu worries in the news, and bird flu. I thought, “How would an administration react like that if that really happens?” They’d go over the top, and suddenly, the FDA would become chicken enforcers, and chicken, always looking at them like drugs on the street.
It was me taking a real life event and turning it into a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Matt: Major credit to you, Rob, as well for a series to go 60 issues, and to have the same artist, and do fantastic art that is perfect for the series as well. Your art gels perfectly, and it’s rare to have an artist stay in a book for the entire run.
Rob: I never expected it either. I remember before we ever met doing some interview with a guy, and he was asking me like, “Well, do you ever think you can do an ongoing?” He’s like, “Absolutely not. There’s no way.”
I actually said in the interview, it would have to be a situation where the book was so versatile and diverse that every issue was a little different for me to stay invested, because I would get bored.
CHEW just happened to be that book, that every issue, there are so many dimensions to it that we get to play with. One issue is a horror book, one issue is straight up a crime book, and the next issue is just a goofy, silly - like issue three, kind of a love story book.
John: Sometimes, it’s not issues. It’s between pages.
Rob: Right, exactly.
John: That the mood change.
Rob: Right. It shifts.
Matt: Maybe throw in the vampiric aspects.
John: CHEW has also gotten crazier as a result of him, because I know what he can draw. Or I keep throwing crazier things at him, and he could draw everything, so it keeps getting weirder and weirder.
Kara: One of my favorite parts is something that I didn’t even notice until one of my co-workers, Jen, pointed it out to me. She said, “Pay attention to the backgrounds.” I was like, “Why?” She’s like, “Because all of the posters and all of the written stuff are hilarious.” I started really looking for those in every single thing. I’m just like, “Yes.”
John: People do like that. He does that. Rob does that, and builds in readability to it, but I also think we do that narratively and with repeated imagery and stuff. We want you to get more out of the book and read it regularly.
We’ll plant a character here who you don’t know their significance for issues later, or you might not even be introduced to them. Because “Watchmen” was like that for both of us. For the first thousand times I read Watchmen, I learned something new every time.
I’m not sure that I do anymore, but how many freaking thousand freaking times I’ve read it…not really.
Matt: I think we talked about how could you do it for so long. You guys did something really different with CHEW #27. You fast-forwarded and went forward in time and numbering as well. You eventually re-released that when the numbering was actually coming to #27.
John: I write out of sequence and I design out of sequence, and I wrote this issue. I just thought, “What the hell? Why should we sit on it for a year and a half?” The funny thing is we released this book a year and a half ahead of schedule as a present for the floppy readers, but we didn’t collect it until volume six. Now, people who have discovered CHEW…
Matt: I didn’t know that.
John: …came on to it later, they have no idea that #27 was out of sequence. It was a fun writing. I succeeded in what I wanted to do, because they don’t know. It doesn’t grossly stand out as being a sore thumb. It fits seamlessly in.
Rob: It was really a pain in the butt too. I think we did it after issue 18. It was 18, 27, then 19.
John: I liked the issue more than you did.
Rob: Oh God, I hated it. We spent 18 issues establishing a cast and a tone. Then all of a sudden, all that was gone. There’s only one recurring character, like D-Bear’s in it.
John: Caesar’s. Oh yeah, but even so.
Rob: Everyone else is completely new. It’s no longer FDA. It’s NASA. It’s completely threw me for a loop.
Matt: It’s funny, because we talked to Rick Remender about Fear Agent. That book had so many crazy delays. There was a period of a yearlong break a couple of times when that book came out.
What you mentioned about how the trade readers will never see that, the majority of readers will probably read in trade paperback.
They’ll never know about any delays or the break you guys are taking, I think, after 50, which just came out this week. It’s just crazy to think about how this small segment will be the monthly readers, and over time, how people discovered CHEW, like Y the Last Man?
John: People remember Watchmen as this masterpiece, but there was a year delay between 10 and 11. If you’re writing something for a permanent place on a bookshelf, and books are now less disposable floppies and more of a permanent thing, you’d rather wait a month and get something good than some piece of crap fill in or something hacked out just to keep on a schedule.
Rob: Actually, early on about, I think we were in the third arc, issues 11 through 15 where I was just getting really getting tired. Because I’d never done a monthly book before ever, and it was just weighing on me.
I did a show with Darick Robertson who did Transmetropolitan. He did 60 issues of it, right? I went up to him. I was like, “Darick, how did you do this? What’s the best advice you can give me?”
He’s like, “Well, don’t sweat the monthly schedule. If you are a week or two late, don’t worry about it. Because when it goes to trades, no one is ever going to know. Put your best work out as long as it takes and make it to the trades, and no one will ever care.” He was absolutely right.
John: Now, what we’ve learned to do is we do five issues, we do a trade, and then we take a month off. We’ve got really five new things but six units of product, in seven months. By the time we get to the fifth issue, he’s usually a little bit off by a week or two, but then we’ve got a reset button to get ahead.
Kara: That’s a good schedule.
Matt: It is smart.
Kara: Yeah. Do you have a favorite character from the series in terms of writing or drawing?
John: I like Toni with an “i”. The girl, Toni, who I killed way too early is without a doubt my favorite character.
Rob: I don’t know. I love pretty much all of them. There’s a character that we’re actually introducing in issue 51 that is a completely new character, but she’s phenomenal. She’s my absolute hands down favorite character we’ve ever had to draw.
Matt: She’ll get killed in issue 52? [Editor’s Note: this joke killed.]
John: I don’t like writing Savoy. I get really rusty. He uses a lot of flowery words and has a specific obnoxious diction to it.
If I haven’t written him in a few issues, it’s really hard. I spend three or four times, because dialogue is pretty natural for me, but not him.
I’ll be looking up thesaurus.com and going over, “What would he say? What’s the perfect word?” It takes forever to write down. He’s my least favorite.
Matt: The least favorite.
Kara: But I’m sure you’ve expanded your vocabulary marvelously working on that.
John: You would think. Not on day three of a con.
Matt: No, definitely not.
Kara: I do have a small side question. Why are beets the thing that Tony Chu doesn’t get a read on?
John: Beets are red-colored and blood colored. We had a bad guy who was a Russian guy, and Russians have a lot of borscht. I thought there will be some way to tie beets, like one of those things where you don’t know now, but you’ll figure it out later.
Something brilliant will come up as an explanation. Now, 50 issues in, and the Russian, that guy is dead, and I never figured it out. There is no reason other than it was blood-colored, and I thought I’d come up with something.
Kara: It’s funny that you say that because most of my family is Polish, and the Polish people have a version of borscht too, like a beet soup. The first couple of pages where you hear that Tony Chu doesn’t get a read on beets, then I was just like, “Ah.”
Just taken back to all these family Christmas dinners. It’s like, “Ah, of course you’re eating beets.” God, it’s like my least favorite thing.
Matt: What about the animated feature that I think just announced David Tennant?
John: It’s moving very slow. All this Hollywood stuff, we waited forever on Showtime, and then it went away. A year or so ago, we got Steven Yeun and Felicia Day in the studio to record. Then we promised something awesome, and it never happened, and we just were real quiet.
We were supposed to get Robin Williams as Savoy. When Robin passed away, it threw everything into disarray. Because they come to us like, “Oh, what about this actor? Oh, he’d be great. Oh, he wants trillion dollars. What about this actor? He’s terrible.”
It took us forever to nail down the right person, and then make the deal. But then a month ago, we got David Tennant in the studio reading Savoy, and he was really into it.
Matt: That’s awesome.
Kara: Nice.
Matt: What about you?
John: It is super cool.
Matt: What about you Rob with…? I don’t think I’ve seen any art, but how do you feel about your art translating into another medium? It’s got to be awesome.
Rob: It doesn’t feel real yet. I’m really excited about it, but I’m not going to get really excited until we get to that point. I’m going to believe it when I see it.
John: All this Hollywood stuff is always just around the corner.
Matt: Unless you’re actually sitting in the couch or theater or wherever, you’ll wait until that moment.
Rob: Right. I think if it gets done, it’s going to be awesome, but we’ll see.
Matt: What do you guys seek out in your free time? What’s your top list to read right now?
John: Well, I just got my fanboy moment, because David Lapham is here. Stray Bullets is my all-time favorite comic.
Matt: Amazing book.
John: Then after 10 or 12 years hiatus, he’s finally back doing Stray Bullets again with Image, and it’s just as good as it’s ever been. I got to go say hello to him. I was like, “I love you.” Stray Bullets has always been my favorite, and it remains my favorite. It’s coming out again, and it’s just the best.
Matt: That’s a book I actually was totally ignorant of until we got it on comiXology. I was like, “I can’t believe I’d never heard of it.” I don’t know what it is about the book that just flies under the radar for so long.
John: Well, it did disappear for about 10 years. But it was winning Eisners in its run, and it was a critical darling. It’s just comics are generational.
If you fall out of the market long enough, you…
Matt: It’s like Miracleman.
John: …you get forgotten by readers.
Matt: It’s like there’s another generation that has no idea what that is, or what it meant to people.
John: We were at the Diamond Select party last night, and they had Kevin Smith stuff everywhere. We asked the waitress what she thought about Kevin Smith. She’s like, “I’m 23 years old. I have no idea who that is.” That’s how it’s weird.
Matt: He wears long jean shorts and a hockey jersey every day.
John: It’s just weird how pop culture comes in and fades faster. Someday, they’ll be saying that about CHEW.
Matt: What about you, Rob? What do you seek out?
Rob: I don’t read a lot. I have a gigantic shelf of stuff I get from shows, but I’m catching up. I just caught up on Southern Bastards. It’s my new favorite book.
Matt: How excited are you for the daughter in that book?
Rob: Oh, man. It’s such a slow burn.
Matt: It is. It’s a simmer.
Rob: I was waiting at the end of volume one. I was like, “Oh,” and then I got volume two, and it was just all about the coach. It’s like, “This is awesome, but something is about to hit really, really hard.” It’s been phenomenal, man.
Matt: That’s so good.
John: Most of the books I read, I’ll read whatever the really good Marvel and DC book of the moment is, but I’m buying a lot more Image books not because they are my publisher but because they are diverse and really good.
Matt: Anything else besides Southern Bastards?
Rob: I’m catching up on Locke & Key. I got all the trades. I’m just working through them slowly.
I need to catch up on Walking Dead. I have all the trades again. I have all of my friends’ books, I just haven’t read them yet. I think after CHEW is over, I would just take a month and just do nothing but read.
Kara: That sounds magical.
Rob: It is.
Kara: I’m sure we all wish we could do that.
Matt: I appreciate you guys taking the time out.
John: Thanks for having us.
Matt: CHEW is a huge office favorite, and we can’t wait to see how it wraps up. Thanks guys.
John: Good.
Kara: Thank you.
John: You’ll be disappointed.