Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for the best books of the year in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.DetailsGet Jiro: Blood and Sushi FREE Shipping on orders over . DetailsAppetites: A Cookbook FREE Shipping on orders over . Q&A with Anthony Bourdain What made you decide to write a graphic novel? Were you always a fan of the medium and had this story on your mind for a while? Anthony Bourdain: I've been a comics fan since childhood--when I was a serious collector of early Marvels (1960s, MAD, horror comics--later began collecting EC's, a few Golden Age, and late 60's West Coast Undergrounds). An early ambition was to be the next R. Crumb. Sadly, my illustration skills--while decent--were not up to anywhere near that standard. When Joel Rose brought the idea back up after an earlier discussion, I thought, "What red blooded American boy in his mid fifties wouldn't do a graphic novel if given the chance? As long as we can do it right."

The fact that Vertigo, very early on, was supportive of the kind of high quality art we were looking for made all the difference. How have your travels across the world informed this story? Did you draw inspiration from anything specific? AB: Well, I clearly love Japan--and am obsessed with hyper-fetishistic, uncompromising old school style sushi, and due to my travels, have been lucky enough to spend a lot of time there. jiro dreams of sushi portuguesBut the book reflects a lot of my food obsessions (funky classic brasserie/bistro) and prejudices. jiro dreams of sushi itaIt exposes you to things. sushi grade fish tacomaMy love of street food is certainly a product of my travels. Food culture as a whole has been a bit of a phenomenon in the media over the last few years, but not so much in comics.

Was that part of your motivation for wanting to create Get Jiro? AB: I think the explosion of interest in chefs and restaurants is certainly easy fodder for satire. But my motivation was really nothing more than to help tell a story that would be fun, extremely bloody, beautifully illustrated--and insanely detailed as to the specifics of cooking and eating. I'm a big fan of classic Japanese cinema, Hammett's Red Harvest, spaghetti westerns and food--so these were obvious elements. Your co-writer, Joel Rose, and artist Langdon Foss have both done comic work in the past. What was it like working with them, and how did their experience with creating comics help shape the book? AB: Joel is the very first guy in the world to have ever published me--back when he ran the legendary Lower East Side literary magazine, Between C and D. He's a friend, whose books I admire enormously, who's been supportive--an even instrumental--in my career since the beginning, for over two decades. It surely helped that he also worked on some of the most influential graphic novels of the last decades and that he had previous relationships with Vertigo.

Most importantly, he knows how to tell a story. I care less about that. I'm all about dialogue and atmospherics. I think we complement each other's work nicely. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. "'Get Jiro!'" unfolds in a dystopian version of Los Angeles where today's (mostly) polite and academic discussions about food have evolved into grisly gastronomic feuds.... In some ways, "Get Jiro!" represents a coming-full-circle thing for Mr. Bourdain."—The New York Times"What's an ex-yakuza enforcer turned sushi chef to do, ask culinary expert and author Bourdain (Medium Raw) and co-writer Joel Rose (La Pacifica) in this boisterous lampooning of food culture, a pet project for Bourdain, who seems to revel in the unrestrained narrative allowed in a comic book. Their answer will be enjoyable to anyone versed in samurai revenge stories or the films of Sam Peckinpah.... The book's saving grace is the wonderfully clean and detailed art by an all-star team of artists led by illustrator Foss, whose meticulously researched and composed visuals mirror Jiro's precision with a knife and produce equally appetizing results."

—Publishers Weekly"Bourdain...promised 'an ultra-violent slaughter-fest over culinary arcane,' and he delivers pretty much exactly that....Bourdain let's his foodie id run wild, extolling the elegant simplicity of a peasant dish like pot-au-feu here and caving in skulls with sauté pans there.  Foss' stubby, dough-faced figures walk a fine line between goofy and thuggish, and fall apart with great ickiness when dismembered. Equal parts blunt culinary opinion-mongering and satiric takedown of the very same chef-worship culture Bourdain helped create, this amusing diversion coasts comfortably in the wake of the standard bearer of gore-soaked foodie comics..."—Booklist See all Editorial Reviews Publisher: Vertigo (May 7, 2013) 6.6 x 0.3 x 10.1 inches Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) #68,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Mystery Never will you put wasabi in your soy sauce again.

Chef Anthony rocked this one! Highly recommended for the manga/foodie lover in your life. Sushi, ass kicking and Anthony bourdain. What's not to love?Would like a little more backstory, maybe in the next one I cannot open it on a Mac Pro Rollicking story that oozes the "Bourdain" essence. Entertaining, jet fast read, and it reminded me of the proper way to eat sushi.Great graphic novel for any collection Learn more about Amazon GiveawayWhile he's best-known as a chef and host of shows like CNN's Parts Unknown, if you ask Anthony Bourdain to describe his profession in as few words as possible, he'd probably mention he's a writer first. "On a good writing day," Anthony Bourdain told Men's Journal  "I'll write myself into a corner, then spend the rest of the day trying to solve the problem." Although his most well-known book is probably the 2000 memoir about working in kitchens from New York to Japan, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Bourdain has also dabbled in crime fiction, and the 2012 graphic novel about a killer sushi master, Get Jiro!, which  "a lysergic mixture of Top Chef and The Warriors."

Next month, Bourdain will team back up with co-writer Joel Rose along with Alé Garza and Dave Johnson, and revisit Jiro, this time with a prequel set in Japan that tells his origin story, Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi. Men's Journal caught up with Bourdain to talk about his love of subversive comics, dystopian fiction, and how he functions as a writer even with a schedule that doesn’t have too many moments to spare. You talk about the influence of music and writers like William Burroughs. Were you a comic book fan growing up? I collected Golden Age EC comics. I grew up reading the original Mad magazine. I was a big fan of the old Mad from the '50s with Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. It was back when Mad was a comic book. They were really disturbed, something really dark and filled with anxiety and sex and violence. So I wanted to be a comic artist. Then that sort of morphed and I wanted to be an underground cartoonist like R.Crumb or Robert Williams or a lot of the stuff that was underground that were really exciting to me.

I wasn't a very dedicated art student, to put it that way. I sort of put those dreams aside. But I had a sizable and impressive collection of comics, so when I got the opportunity to work on one a few years ago, it was kind of a realization of unfulfilled dreams. I was trying to describe your first graphic novel, Get Jiro!, to a friend, and the only thing I could come up with was this cross between Kill Bill with JG Ballard and William Gibson and food thrown in, kind of. How did you come up with it? It's aspirational in a lot of ways. I was sitting at Sushi Yasuda in New York, and the chef there is a friend and somebody I really respect. I'm well aware of the many, many years it took him just to learn how to cook rice properly before his master allowed him to work with the fish. And I was sitting there as these two wealthy knuckleheads sit down at this bar and immediately start stirring a big wad of his hand-grated, fresh wasabi into a dish of soy sauce with the intention of dunking, unseen and untried, his sushi in there, and I saw a look of pain and discomfort.

I thought, man, wouldn't it be great if he could just reach across the bar and slice their heads off. So that was the jumping off point. Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where disrespecting good sushi could get you killed and no one would care? In my fiction, people who don’t know how to eat or who do terrible things to food tend to get killed. Something that runs through all of your projects, TV or writing, is the theme that food isn't something to be taken lightly. You know, I worked in an industry for 30 years, and more often than not, the chefs were punished for their best efforts. There's a disconnect, for much of my career anyway, between what we were doing in the kitchen and how hard we worked on things and how they might have been appreciated. You know, the lives of our costumers are very different, and very remote from the lives we lived in the kitchen. I guess that has something to do with it. So food and strife go hand-in-hand? There's nothing more political than food.

As I travel around the world, it's either intensified, a national or ethnic vibe, or something that people fight or struggle every day to have. I mean, who's eating and who’s not eating. When I'm traveling, countries where food isn't worth arguing about are not countries I generally enjoy being in. In the Tokyo episode of Parts Unknown, you say your first time in the city, where the graphic novels are set, was transformative. What kind of effect does the city have on you still? You confront it right away with all of the things you don't know. You know it's such a steep learning curve, even mastering one block in Tokyo — it's so densely packed with stimulus and little worlds within worlds. Just learning to behave appropriately by Japanese standards is an impossible task. It's so different, so stimulating, and when you go there for the first time — when I went for the first time — you really are forced, in a violent way, I think, to re-examine this notion that you come from the center of the world.

That's immediately brought into deep question. Everything you thought was true has to be re-examined now because you realize, 'Wow, maybe I don't live in the center of the world. Maybe I have a whole hell of a lot to learn.' It threw me off kilter in a wonderful way that I've never recovered from. People like to speculate who Jiro is based on. It has been erroneously reported that there is a connection between the character and [sushi master, subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi] Jiro Ono. You've had a number of successful nonfiction books, and you've written some crime fiction as well. How do you approach a graphic novel differently? I like to start all my stories with a character and with a dialogue and a situation. Joel Rose is my co-author and he's had a lot more experience working in graphic novels, so as far as pacing and how to break down a story into digestible pieces but work in a graphic way, that's something he's much better at than me. But it started as a story: the dialogue, details, and atmospherics, these are the things I like.

The mechanics of making its layout, mapping out a plot in a dramatically coherent and satisfying way is the most difficult part for me. I tend to not care about plot much either when I read or write. Like a good Elmore Leonard book, I don't care what happens. I like the characters. I like to lose myself in the details, the atmospherics, and the lushness of the dialogue. One of things that's great about Elmore Leonard, for instance, is you really don’t care whodunit, because he tells you whodunit right away. It's not a mystery. How do you carve out time to write? Do you have some sort of schedule? I write first thing in the morning. I found that I'm a morning person. I always write first thing in the morning before I have time to think up any of the million good reasons why I shouldn't or couldn't be writing. I also tend to get progressively stupider as the day progresses, so I'm at my best in the morning. I try to jump on that quickly, write for as long as I can and then go about my business.