Anthony Bourdain Has a New Comic Book in the Works

World traveler and future food hall impresario Anthony Bourdain has a fun new project in the works: He’s working on a chef-centric comic book series called Hungry Ghosts, Vulture reports.

As diehard Bourdain fans are well aware, this isn’t the Parts Unknown star’s first foray into the comic genre: In 2012 he released Get Jiro!, a graphic novel featuring a sushi chef who beheads customers who dare to order California rolls, and followed it up with a 2015 prequel, Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi.

Berger Books

According to Vulture, “The series will be a riff on the Japanese Edo-period game 100 Candles, in which samurai would try to one-up each other with stories to freak each other out. Here, the tellers won’t be samurai; they’ll be chefs from around the world, and their stories will be united by their focus on food.” Hungry Ghosts will be a four-book series and is set to be released on the new Berger Books imprint of indie comic book publisher Dark Horse sometime in 2018.

A self-professed comic book nerd, Bourdain explained in a 2015 Eater interview that writing for comics is dramatically different than the kind of work he does on Parts Unknown, and he enjoys the challenge: “I find plot difficult. I like characters, I like atmospherics, and I like the details, what the room smells like. How to get the characters up a tree and then back down is tricky for me. It’s fun because we’re working within an established and understood genre; there are certain conventions that I really like and enjoy.”

• Vertigo Editor Karen Berger Is Launching a New Line of Comics [Vulture]
• Inside ‘Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi,’ Anthony Bourdain's Newest Comic Book [E]