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Elmer: A Comic Book is so fascinating. It is about chickens leveling up to humans so we cannot kill, cook and eat them anymore. Think Planet of the Apes. But instead of apes, you have chickens. They are mixed with human beings: queuing with us for the same job interview, dreaming of having sex with our women, etc. Practically doing the same stuffs that we do everyday. When they get angry with us, they can pluck our eyes out, hang us until we are dead, burn our buses with us inside or even think of eradicating our whole human race. How can they do all of these? I do not have any idea.

Kind of scary, right? This book is. Really. However, the chickens only do that when they are provoked or pushed to the limit of their patience. This book also has a heart. This is recommended book for readers who enjoy reading about typical families whose members love each other, the mother continuously, even beyond grave, loving the father, the brother sacrificing himself for his older brother and even the typical daily conversations of the siblings busy with their own careers and love lives. And these are all exhibited by the chicken characters. How can they do all of these? I do not have any idea.

However, we know that sci-fi diehards can believe anything. So, this is a recommended book for anybody whose out-of-this-world imagination is not as dead as mine. As an example, the generation of the post-extant Gallus Gallus in Hokkaido is not fully explained but the idea is a rehash not only in The Planets of the Apes but also in Bernard Malamud's God's Grace and the concept of talking animals has been used so many times before: Charlotte's Web, Babe and your countless Disney movies. So, if the diehards were able to accept these ideas in those earlier works, nobody, even a doubter like me, can prevent them from loving this book.

I finished this book for just an hour or so while waiting at a medical clinic yesterday. Even how implausible, this still was a fascinating read. As far as the structure was concerned, I just had some problems on the sudden shifts of the story in a couple of parts as they did not have any trigger to prompt the reader that the next scene was a flashback. Some characters, e.g. the young Farmer Ben and Michael, looked similar and for a while confused me. However, the most unbelievable icky part is how can chicken fantasize about making love to a human being? I guess a rooster is in worse situation than a castrated or impotent guy because the later can still enjoy receiving and giving other forms of sex with his partner. But a chicken and a human being? Oh, common on.

However, I appreciate the effort that the author and illustrator Gerry Alanguilan put in coming up with this book. In his acknowledgment portion, he mentioned that he also currently does comics for some US companies. Once again, this attests to the world-class talents of the Filipino artists. Well done, Gerry. Just don't push your luck too hard on the sex part, please.