Generous servings of risk and risotto
Late chef Bourdain shows the way to readers’ hearts is through what they can stomach
Like Anthony Bourdain, the final graphic novel he co-wrote is challenging and contrary. It’s hard to imagine a less palatable way to talk about food, but that was Bourdain all over.
Hungry Ghosts is also one of the best graphic novels produced this year, even if it gives you the dry heaves.
Bourdain, chef, TV show host and evercurious traveller, made a career out of taking risks and laughing about it. So it’s appropriate this posthumous publication, inspired by a 17th-century Japanese parlour game and co-written by Bourdain’s friend Joel Rose, is a collection of horror stories and five new recipes inspired by the stomach-churning events they depict. For example, the story “Boil In The Belly,” about a man who mysteriously grows an insatiable extra mouth on his body, triggered Bourdain to recommend thinlysliced duck breast. Then there’s the risotto recipe based on a story about flying severed heads. Yes, they’re real recipes, if you could bear to cook them.
Hungry Ghosts is sluiced to an evenbloodier part of the kitchen by the work of nine of the best artists in horror comics. Take, for instance, Francesco Francavilla, fresh off a run on Detective Comics, who draws a story that 1950s moral crusaders would have immediately added to their piles of burning horror comics. Leonardo Manco draws scenes that are satisfyingly disgusting, while Irene Koh’s contribution is crisp and beautiful. Hungry Ghosts offers many variations but ties together well.
That’s due to the skills of Karen Berger, former figurehead of DC/Vertigo, who launches Berger Books with this title and others. Like DC’s Julius Schwartz or Marvel’s Stan Lee, Berger is a rare type of editor, emblematic of a period when comics leapt forward. Shepherding titles such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, she helped to change everything and it is a joy that she’s still overseeing creatorowned books like Hungry Ghosts.
Despite all the collaborators needed to make comics work, this book is rightly focused on Anthony Bourdain. Before his death four months ago, he and Rose dedicated their creation to the people behind EC Comics, those horror titles so enthusiastically burned by moral guardians. Rose, however, has since added another dedication, to his late friend, “the hungriest ghost of them all.”
This is a wonderful book, and I don’t care one bit that it spoiled my appetite.