Elmer

Writer/Artist - Gerry Alanguilan

Publisher - SLG Publishing. $12.95 USD

In this parable about racism and equality, longtime superhero comics inker Alanguilan tells the story of Jake Gallo, a chicken born in the second generation of chickens who found themselves able to speak, with all the intelligence and emotions of humans. In fact, they’re recognized as equal, but as with blacks or Jews or any other minority, not everyone can accept this. Jake is an angry young chicken, not well adjusted like his sister or particularly brother Freddie, a rising movie star. 

If the reader can accept this conceit of smart chickens, they can go onto enjoy a terrific story. Alanguilan makes it easy, developing Jake as confrontational, even unlikable, but clearly hurting. His family loves him and wants him to adjust, but it’s hard, especially as he’s just lost his father, Elmer. 

What gets Jake on the path to understanding is the discovery of his father’s memoir, which explains how things were from birth to the start of their human-level sentience. Alanguilan does a good job thinking through how humanity would react to these developments, and how the longtime foodstuff poultry would react to finally having the brains needed to hate and carry out revenge. The setting and plot are believable enough given the premise, but it’s his characterization that sells it. Fighting cock Uncle Joseph was bred to be a killer and he knows he can’t escape his fate; he can only be a symbol, a legend. It’s up to the wiser Elmer to take the smarter, longer range course for acceptance with his newspaper columns about life as a chicken, and it’s up to Jake to spread his father’s story and expand upon his work. 

Alanguilan’s art is extremely well-suited to the story, utilizing grids for clarity but with his inking gifts on display with lots of rural texture (farmhouses, feathers, squalor), occasionally stopping for a jaw-dropping Philippine landscape or grisly scene of devastation or mass culling. Appropriately, the chicken characters are drawn with as great a range of expression (shock, joy, contentment, rage, etc.) as the humans. It’s funny, but each time I write, “humans,” I feel odd about it; that’s how convincing a case Alanguilan makes for the chickens being just a more recently recognized form of humanity. As it seems to be the last word Alanguilan wants on this world, one could make minor quibbles over the lack of development of Jake’s sister, or Jake’s possible romantic relationship with non-chicken human Anna Rosie, but again, these are minor quibbles. It’s a very well done book.

—Christopher Allen