The writer, chef and TV personality says most of his peers confine their homicidal tendencies to a dark corner of their minds. Bourdain lets his dark fantasy loose through a strong and silent sushi chef named Jiro in Get Jiro!, the DC/Vertigo Comics book out Wednesday in comic shops and next Tuesday in bookstores.
Bourdain's recipe for Get Jiro! includes Japanese samurai films, spaghetti Westerns and Dashiell Hammett-style hard-boiled crime fiction, with a few splashes of blood-soaked violence akin to the 1950s shock-horror comics he collected as a youngster.
"It stems completely from the fact that I was a comic collector and enthusiast and wannabe comic artist when I was a kid and a tween," Bourdain says.
With co-writer and friend Joel Rose and artist Langdon Foss, the culinary personali ty imagines a futuristic Los Angeles ruled by food culture. Jiro runs his small sushi place outside of downtown, but the city's two rival ruling chefs â€" Bob, a ruthless purveyor of high-end dishes, and the vegan-leaning yet still ambitious Rose â€" both eye having Jiro and his skills with rice and fish on their team.
Jiro is his own man, though, and he doesn't suffer fools â€" or those who persistently ask for California rolls. In one scene, after a patron drops a perfectly made piece of sushi, rice down, into a wasabi-laden dish of soy sauce, Jiro loses it and the customer loses his head. (His friends, however, keep on chowing down.)
From the start, Bourdain aimed for a food-centric book where the details were "thrillingly accurate" â€" how dishes looked, the knives and equipment used, and even what wine went with a particular plate of eats.
"I wanted Get Jiro! to be hyper-nerdly in that respect. But I also knew I wanted it to be fun and funny and really violent," Bourdain says.
"I needed to create a world where lopping somebody's head off for disrespecting a well-made piece of sushi would be seen as appropriate behavior. There are a few sushi chefs who are notorious in New York and L.A. for being very unforgiving about that sort of thing. I thought, let's just take it to its surreal conclusion."
Foss knew Bourdain's fans are mostly in-the-know foodies, so the artist depended on the writer for a lot of the details, including depicting a tricked-out "kitchen of all kitchens" in one scen e, he says.
"Does the broiler go next to the tandoori ovens? Is it conscionable to put a sink an arm's length from the sauté station? I think Tony must have given me just enough information to go by, since he seems really happy with what I did."
Bourdain found scripting a graphic novel similar to writing for TV â€" he's also scripting for the third season of David Simon's HBO show Treme. In addition to his TV duties over the years, such as hosting the travel-and-food series No Reservations, Bourdain is an award-winning food writer who also has penned a number of cookbooks as well as prose crime fiction.
When he was a kid growing up in the 1960s, comics were his go-to, especially EC horror books, Mad Magazine and assorted underground comics. R. Crumb was a favorite artist, but he was completely enamored with Will Eisner and his cinematic The Spirit comics.
"He was the Orson Welles of comic books and really ahead of his time. I was just choked with envy and horribly frustrated as a young would-be comic artist with my total inability to even approach that kind of work," says Bourdain, who realized his artistic limitations by his teenage years.
His illustrations these days? "I doodle. That's about it."
While Americans as a society haven't bowed dow n to chef overlords Bobby Flay and Giada De Laurentiis yet, foodie culture is pervasive in pop culture with cable networks and umpteen shows about everything from cupcakes to diner food.
Bourdain was in Paris, where he took note of young hipsters lined up for two hours outside a food truck waiting for an American hamburger. So the dystopic society Bourdain describes in Get Jiro! isn't too far from reality, he says.
"We're certainly at a lampoonable point in history, one that I'm pretty happy about, I have to say. It's good for the world, arguably â€" better chefs than reality stars."
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