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Underground > Comic Books >

James Stokoe's Wonton Soup

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

04:24 / 25.12.07

KZAM!

After much, much, much furtive waiting on my part, the new Oni Press book Wonton Soup arrived at my door, created by James Stokoe -- member of the YOSH Collective founded by Brandon Graham.

Link

It's pretty killer. Plot-wise, it's pretty simple: cooking prodigy Johnny Boyo returns to the planet he went to culinary school on before he dropped out and is forced to participate in a cook-off with creepy brain-linked twin alien chefs. All the while, he encounters the perfect wonton soup and tries to make things work with the girl he left behind. The basic plot mechanics are fairly basic, but the style is fairly sweet -- Stokoe feels like a Kirby to Graham's Ditko, and there is a lot of Kirby in his work, mixed in with the lifted manga vibes.

It's very silly and doesn't quite manage to raw sexiness of King City, but I had a lot of fun reading it and the artwork has a strong sense of texture about it, everything feeling a little bit grimy and metallic without being dead serious or cyberpunkish.

Did anyone else find this and read this?

12:53 / 25.12.07

I have to say that I enjoyed this more in concept than in execution. I read about it ages ago and when I saw it on the store shelf a few weeks back I eagerly snapped it up and read through it fairly quickly, and felt vaguely disappointed.

One of the things that bothered me about it was that none of the cooking sequences seemed genuine - even though the recipes are composed of alien ingredients I was still hoping for a degree of plausibility, which I didn't find there was. The recipes and cooking scenes felt...fake to me, like they were created by someone with no real knowledge of how to cook (compared with another recent story about cooking, Ratatouille, in which the film production crew studied with master chefs so that the animation would be authentic). I think a successful story like this should make the reader really want to eat the dishes depicted, even though they're impossible, alien creations. As it is, while there were a couple of cute ideas, the descriptions of the ingredients and the cooking techniques were sort of flat and uninspired and made the whole thing ring false for me.

Still, I do award it points for concept and the artwork is fun.

14:23 / 25.12.07

A lack of groundedness is a problem I have with a lot of *fun* books. I'm not saying that writers should strive for realism, just that they should have a handle on where weight needs to be added, otherwise there just ain't no drama.