In 1984, a young Anthony Bourdain showed up uninvited on the doorstep of a Lower East Side literary magazine.
Dressed in chef’s whites and clearly high on heroin, the 20-something cook dreamed of making comics and had recently submitted some of his work to Between C & D — the underground mag that author Joel Rose produced on a dot-matrix printer in a former shooting gallery.
There was just one problem.
“The drawings were sort of sucky,” Rose, now 70, tells The Post.
But the kid could write. So the “Kill Kill Faster Faster” author brought him inside and helped him publish his first short story — beginning a literary career that would see Bourdain scale the heights of best-seller lists and a friendship that would change his life.
Now, 33 years later — and three months after his shocking suicide in a French hotel room — Bourdain has published what may be his final book: a collection of comics co-written with Rose.
“Hungry Ghosts,” out next month from Dark Horse Comics’ Berger Books imprint, is a fitting bookend to the globe-trotting chef’s life and career: a series of gastronomic ghost stories that bring together his love of food, Japanese culture and old-school horror comics, plus some new recipes.
And the art is anything but sucky. Bourdain and Rose recruited an all-star roster of illustrators, from alt-comics legend Paul Pope to “The Legend of Korra” artist Irene Koh, to bring each spooky tale to life.
When Bourdain first rang Between C & D’s buzzer more than three decades ago, Rose saw a cook with some writing talent — but certainly not a celebrated author, let alone a TV star.
“I really nursed his writing. He was fragile and didn’t have confidence,” says Rose, who grew up the son of a Stage Deli waiter and worked his way through the city’s restaurants while at college.
“He was a regular guy, he wasn’t self impressed. Sort of the opposite — he thought he was getting away with something, the biggest scam ever. He didn’t think he was special, any more than anybody else.”
After that first story — about a chef scoring dope on the Lower East Side — Bourdain published a couple of mystery novels, but it was another fateful encounter with Rose that really set his career as an author alight.
Bourdain was in Tokyo and had sent his pal a “really funny and very vivid” email about visiting a fish market there. It was so good, Rose insisted on reading it to his wife, an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, while she was breastfeeding their son.
“She said, ‘Does he have more stories like this?’ I said, ‘Yeah he’s had tons,’” he recalls.
“She finished with the baby, called Tony’s agent . . . made an offer — and that was ‘Kitchen Confidential.’ ”
The no-holds-barred 2000 memoir on his life in the “culinary underbelly” of high-end restaurants became a best-seller and launched Bourdain into superstardom.
But he never gave up on comics. By the time of their collaboration, Rose had spent several years writing and editing at DC Comics. Bourdain wouldn’t let it go.
“Tony was bugging me — let’s do a graphic novel together — and I put him off for a really long time,” said Rose. “Then one Thanksgiving he was here, he cornered me . . . and said ‘We gotta do this, I’ve got this great idea.’ ”
His idea was “Get Jiro!” — a darkly humorous send-up of modern foodie culture set in a dystopian future where celebrity chefs rule Los Angeles like warlords.
The book, published in 2012, was an unexpected best-seller and spawned a popular prequel three years later.
“It was so much fun — I’m a novelist, I live such an isolated life, I just torture myself every day. I didn’t have to do that,” Rose says of their collaboration.
“Any time I ran into any block or something I couldn’t figure out, I could just send it off to [Bourdain] and say, ‘Hey can you help me on this?’ He would be back to me in minutes; he was at his absolute best when he just let it fly.”
“Hungry Ghosts,” which was initially published in individual comic-book issues, is a more ambitious but equally gruesome collection of kitchen nightmares, loosely weaving eight stories together through the theme of food.
The setting is inspired by an old samurai parlor game, where participants light 100 candles, then take turns telling spooky stories as the room grows darker, extinguishing one light with each tale.
In “Hungry Ghosts,” the game is brought into the modern day with an international group of chefs all thrust together into the kitchen of a Hamptons mansion for one night.
Their gory stories span history and the globe — one is set in early 20th century Spain, where a greedy man can’t stop stuffing his face with horse meat, and another in modern-day America, where a chef is possessed by a ravenous monster that can only be removed via his butt — but are all based on Japanese folk tales. The horse addict ends up being devoured by a vengeful equine-shaped spirit known as a tsukimono, while the butt creature is the titular hungry ghost.
The tales are also a throwback to the horror comics of the 1940s and ’50s published by EC Comics, best known for the Tales From the Crypt series, that both men loved as kids.
The book includes five of Bourdain’s own recipes, though Rose acknowledges readers might not be in the mood for cooking meatballs right after reading a story about a creature biting off pirates’ testicles.
Bourdain was himself traversing the planet during the writing process, but he and Rose volleyed the scripts back and forth over email.
“We’d known each other for such a long time, we sort of worked like an old married couple. We instinctually knew where we were going,” he says.
But he didn’t see everything.
For one thing, Rose says he didn’t realize the subtle moral lessons his writing partner had woven through the stories until later.
“One story was a guy who got his just dues in the end, but it was about rape. But Tony didn’t want to go there,” he said of Bourdain, whose girlfriend Asia Argento last year accused Weinstein of sexual assault. “This preceded all that Harvey Weinstein stuff, but I realize what it was now.”
Rose also had no idea what else was going on in Bourdain’s head until their agent rang that fateful June morning. Months later, he’s still trying to process the news while promoting their book alone.
“She said, ‘Tony passed,’ I said, ‘Tony who?’ It didn’t compute. I’d just talked to him,” he recalls. “We had been working for, probably a year, daily back and forth. I think any time someone close to you does something to themselves, you question: What did I miss? How did I fail this person?”
“The answer is you didn’t do anything, this wasn’t your decision. You think: I could have done something. I would have done something, anything,” he continued. “I didn’t see it.”
The longtime friends had just finished writing the book’s dedication — “to the memory and enduring allure of EC Comics” — a few days before Bourdain’s death, Rose says.
But he added a second dedication: “For the hungriest ghost of them all.”
From “Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts“
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