Image comics has a pretty great series out called ‘Chew’ and it’s one that had a pilot made awhile ago. Showtime and Circle of Confusion made the pilot and unfortunately it didn’t screen well so nothing ever happened from it.

Fans of the comic were crushed. John Layman and Rob Guillory truly created a grizzly masterpiece that is hard to put down! As long as you can stomach the contents that is. It’s understandably a comic that could be difficult to translate to screen and make it work.

The premise? Tony Chu is a detective who gets psychic impressions from the food he eats. When investigating a black market chicken restaurant (chicken is illegal from a horrible bird flu epidemic that killed millions), he finds out that the soup he is eating isn’t chicken. It’s human. When he goes to arrest the chef, he ends up killing himself and Chu realizes there’s only one way to get the names of all the victims and ends up eating the cook.

So you’d think with a show like ‘Dexter‘ coming to an end they would have been all over this! Okay, the cannibalistic side is probably going to be too much for quite a few audiences but, oh wait, ‘Hannibal‘ is a huge success. Sadly they passed on the pilot. While that initially sounds like bad news, since then, Showtime’s option for the property has lapsed and Jeff Krelitz (‘Torchwood: Web of Lies) just picked up the rights to make it!

Krelitz’s plans for the show are to make a motion comic and a live-action television series. He actually just completed another Image Comic property in the same manner by doing ‘Peter Panzerfaust’ (a Peter Pan themed story set in World War II) as a motion comic that is currently being developed by the BBC for television.

This type of project isn’t new for Krelitz and it seems to be working.

The comic series itself has received 2 Eisner Awards as well as 2 Harvey Awards and stands out as an original take on detective work. I mean, who else eats their evidence to find a killer?

As we find out more we’ll be sure to keep you updated, though it’s clearly going to be one twisted ride once it finally does happen. I hope they can pull it off as I couldn’t put this comic down when it was coming out. Clearly with the trades hitting the New York Times’ best seller charts on multiple occasions, this proves that I’m not the only one who felt this way either!

So, whose hungry for this show to start?

 

Source: The Hollywood Reporter.