Anthony Bourdain will be be remembered as a chef, a writer, a television personality, a filmmaker, a world traveler, and an advocate for the marginalized. But lest we forget, he was also a geek. Bourdain grew up reading the envelope-pushing sci-fi and horror of publisher EC Comics and the outré underground work of R. Crumb and his cohort. In the ’70s he once went to some small comic show and he showed his work to underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who basically told him his art wasn’t very good. Bourdain revealed in multiple interviews he loved comics well into adulthood, holding onto his collection until he sold them to feed his demons. “I sold them off for drugs,” he told in 2013. “I was a sensible kid who had a comic book collection, but cocaine is a powerful drug”.
As an adult, he made good on his fandom, eventually co-writing two graphic novels, the dystopian 2012’s Get Jiro! and 2015’s Get Jiro! Blood and Sushi, and one anthology horror series, this year’s Hungry Ghosts. As these comics weave sci-fi and fantasy with the culinary world, Bourdain’s comics feel like a radically different side of the renowned chef whose journeys abroad rarely, if ever, held the unsavory flavor of colonization. In comics, Bourdain is bitingly funny, and a tad sinister.
In the opening of Get Jiro!, the hero — whom Bourdain said he imagined a young Taskeshi Kitano in a film adaptation — decapitates a white guy for ordering a California roll. This, from the same Anthony Bourdain who drank beers over blue plastic chairs in a working-class Hanoi diner with Obama. The action in the two Get Jiro! books (published by DC) is set in a future L.A. where chefs are feudal lords fighting for territory. A turf war is brewing between fusion cooks and organic vegans, when in the middle steps Jiro, a lone sushi chef who is pulled into both sides of a food fight.
Hungry Ghosts, published this year by Dark Horse, is a fantasy anthology that spins the supernatural with food. The four-issue series contains multiple short stories, set in times and places as varied as ancient Japan and modern France, but all share the common thread of food, storytelling, and the unexplained. The main plotline revolves around a Russian oligarch who is hosting a party at his beach house on Long Island. As the night grows darker and stormier, he and his rich cronies get bored, so he invites the chefs working in his kitchen to play a version of 100 candles, an old game in which brave samurai would try to one-up each other with terrifying tales of ghosts, demons, and unspeakable beings. This take on the Japanese Edo-period game gets the Bourdain touch with chef-storytellers telling tales about food and hunger.
These collections of kitchen nightmares are a thrilling way to pass the time, but proceed with caution — you might lose your appetite somewhere along the way…