Get Jiro: Anthony Bourdain’s Wild World of Chefs, Comics and Food

Anthony Bourdain took his love of comics and his knowledge of restaurant culture and put them together in Get Jiro!, the graphic novel he co-wrote with Joel Rose for DC’s Vertigo imprint. Set in a near-future Los Angeles, it imagines chefs as celebrities, gangsters and feudal lords. Food isn’t just dinner anymore. It is power, status and, occasionally, a very good reason to kill somebody.

Bourdain was genuinely into comics. He called Get Jiro! an “overgrown little boy’s dream come true,” and the project was much more than a celebrity name on a comic book. He and Rose built a world where Bourdain could poke fun at foodie culture while drawing on everything he knew about professional kitchens.

And if you’re wondering what kind of comics kid Bourdain was, it wasn’t Miss Beazley, the grouchy Archie cafeteria cook. One artist he admired was Richard Corben, the legendary Heavy Metal artist, whose work was about as far from the Archie lunchroom as you could get. Then again, maybe Bourdain did have a little Miss Beazley in him. He could be just as grouchy, sharp-tongued and completely unimpressed with bullshit.

Then things get wonderfully weird. Take Condiment King, the Batman villain whose weapons include ketchup and mustard. If anybody in comics gets to decide whether food belongs in the story, it’s Jughead Jones. Archie describes him as having an insatiable appetite, with burgers, fries, pizza and plenty more on his menu.

But comics were also a food catalogue disguised as entertainment. I learned about Hostess cakes through comic-book ads, long before I knew what some of those American treats actually tasted like. For kids outside America, those ads could offer a glimpse of an entire food culture.

That makes Get Jiro! part of a much bigger relationship between comics and food. The original arrived in 2012, followed by Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi in 2015. Bourdain even talked about wanting to see Jiro become a television series. Now his strange culinary universe has finally made the jump to animation with Adult Swim.

So here’s some food for thought. Bourdain understood that food could be culture, status, art, obsession and even a weapon. Comics understood that too. Sometimes it comes from a master chef. Sometimes from Jughead. And sometimes, apparently, it comes flying out of a mustard bottle.