A review by crookedtreehouse
Chew, Vol. 8: Family Recipes by John Layman

5.0

The Lost Phenomenon is when a serial story such as a comic or TV show (such as, say, "Lost") starts out with a really cool premise that involves a central mystery or series of small mysteries that the audience is invested in seeing solved. They get attached to the characters, and they are willing to accept a barrage of new mysteries, so long as there is a promise of a cool resolution to the overall storyarc, and the little mysteries start to get solved in a satisfying manner. And then the story falls apart, the characters act against their own interests in a perplexing way that is never satisfyingly explained, and ultimately, the audience feels betrayed that the writer(s) either didn't know what the mysteries were really about, and thus threw some half-baked macguffins in, or worse, they always knew what the ending would be, but the ending sucks (sometimes referred to as the Battlestar Galactica Frustration).

With volume eight of Chew, they mysteries start to be explained, and they're far-fetched in an entertaining way that aligns not only with the narrative structure but includes many small detail stories that seemed like they could have been inconsequential to the overall plot. With this volume, it seems clear that every character we've met, and every weird sidetrack we've taken has some use in the main plot of the book.