The protagonists of Wonton Soup (Oni Press) are Johnny Boyo and Deacon Vans, a pair of deep-space truckers. Although they don’t drive a truck—they fly a spaceship. I’m not exactly sure why they’re called still called “truckers” instead of “spaceshippers,” come to think of it. Anyway, Vans’ main passion is life is hooking up with as many crazy alien species as possible and then bragging of his often rather disgusting sexual exploits. Boyo keeps his greatest passion mostly to himself—before dropping out and blasting off, he was the most promising young chef on Plaxos, the Cooking Planet.
A forced landing for repairs on his home planet forces him (and readers) to face his past, including his girlfriend and fellow culinary student Citrus Watts, his eccentric old professor who cooks using volcanoes and explosives and a pair of evil rivals who shame him into a cook-off at the book’s climax.
As should be pretty clear from the opening scenes—which involve space ninjas, humanoid pandas with chips on their shoulders about being endangered and a Star Wars parody about a giant catapult designed to throw planets into other planets—writer/artist James Stokoe isn’t taking things all that seriously here in the plot department, making for a sort of deadpan comedy propped up by sci-fi concepts as inspired as they are hilarious.
Stokoe’s art style immediately recalls the work of Corey S. Lewis and Brandon Graham, which should come as no surprise, given the fact that he’s a member of the same art collective as the Sharknife and King City artists.
Like Lewis’ and Graham’s, Stokoe’s style seems like an organic fusion of manga, video-game, hip-hop and product-design influences, and he delights in world-building, crowding every panel and filling every surface with lines, logos and throwaway gags.
Wonton Soup also recalls popular cooking-competition manga like Iron Wok Jan and Yakitate!! Japan, but the sci-fi setting frees Stokoe from the realistic food science that informs them, as he makes up alien ingredients and futuristic cooking apparatuses on the fly. Is this a bit lazier? Sure. But it’s also funnier, as it allows his characters to cook with ingredients like a sentient spice with an evolutionary imperative to be used in the preparation of a delicious soup, or an animal that wards off predators by being so unbelievably cute it’s near impossible to kill. And use such methods of cooking as plasma pellets fired from a gun. And have their cooking contests judged by a gigantic, sentient tongue.
By carving out such a peculiar niche of seemingly discordant genres—it’s Futurama meets Cowboy Bebop meets Iron Chef!—Stokoe all but guarantees that his book will be the very best sci-fi trucker cooking-competition romantic adventure you read. But even judged against less crazy-quilt comics, it’s solidly crafted and a lot of fun to read.