You may not know Joel Rose by name, but he's had a major impact in the comics and publishing world. Noir comic fans may know him from La Pacifica and his editorial work with Paradox Press in the mid-‘90s, while newer readers have discovered Rose through his more recent material with culinary superstar Anthony Bourdain. Their first collaboration, 2012's Get Jiro, is a raucous tale about a sushi chef gone rogue in a dystopian future. Beyond his work in the comic book industry, Rose’s pen is respected in a number of other fields including fiction and nonfiction prose, journalism and TV.

CBR chatted with the veteran writer about his and Bourdain’s new series and the inaugural title from Dark Horse Comics' Berger Books imprint, Hungry Ghosts, and ended up covering so much more. It doesn’t take much coaxing to get Rose to share a bunch of great stories. Given the tales and anecdotes he recounted, instead of formatting this article as a traditional Q&A, CBR has arranged his answers by the subject they focus on.

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Hungry Ghosts is a four-issue anthology series scheduled to debut in January, with art from Vanesa Del Rey, Leo Manco, Alberto Ponticelli, Paul Pope and Mateus Santolouco and more. To preface our interview with Rose, Anthony Bourdain was kind enough to give us his perspective on Hungry Ghosts: “I’ve long been obsessed with Japanese prints and stories from the Edo period, particularly the more violent and lurid ones. Joel and I have had this idea for a while. Once Karen Berger brought us together, getting the great artists we needed was fast and easy. She knows the best and they respect her for obvious reasons.”

On seminal magazine Between C & D:

Joel Rose: I had this little magazine called Between C & D. I had bought a computer just when personal computers were coming on the market. I bought an Epson QX-10 to do a book. I [had] stumbled into a book contract and I bought this computer. It was a beautiful little computer. I realized it was like a printing press. It sounded like a printing press because it was dot matrix and it came out on that fan fold paper with the sprockets. The paper that I had, had sort of a sheen to it. My daughter and I used to draw with her markers on that paper. I loved doing it.

Where I lived was a pretty rough neighborhood. They were selling dope in glassine envelopes. Everything was happening in the East Village in those days, and there was a lot of writers around. So, I got some writers together and we published these stories. I did them on the dot matrix paper. Just one run through. And then I individually drew the cover on each one and put them in those ziplock plastic bags. I brought them to St. Mark’s book store, an Eastside book store. I only lived a few blocks away but by the time I got home, they were on the phone and saying, “We need more. We’re sold out.” So, I went into major production of these stupid things. It was just one after another after another. Drawing the covers by hand. They were beautiful. Before I knew it the Museum of Modern Art, and The Guggenheim, and The Whitney were all collecting them. It became like a big thing. It was in the New York Times, it was on MTV, it was all over the place.

On meeting Anthony Bourdain:

I got a mock up of a comic book in the mail. The drawings weren’t that good but the writing was good. So, I just wrote a note. Next thing I know, this guy turns up on my doorstep. He was working in Little Italy, I think…or the South Village. He was in the area to score dope, and he stopped by my place because the magazine’s address was right on it. He just rang my bell. He came upstairs and it was Bourdain. He wasn’t Bourdain then, he was just some line cook. But we hit it off. I grew up in the restaurant business and he was slogging through the restaurant business. He and I have been friends ever since. That was like 1982 or ’83. I really encouraged his writing. I published his first story, Chef’s Night Out.

Years later he sent me an email from Tokyo. It was the first time he was there. He was standing in his hotel room looking out over Tokyo and he had been to the fish market that morning, and he was just riffing. He just wanted to share it with me. It was so evocative and funny. I brought it into my wife, who was an editor and a publisher at Random House, and I said, "You have got to read this." We had just had a kid. She was sitting on the living room floor in our apartment breastfeeding this newborn infant and she wanted no part of it. I made her read and she said, “Do you think he’s has any other stories in him?” And I said, “He definitely does.” She suggested he write a book, and that became Kitchen Confidential.

On being hired as a DC Comics editor:

I had a screenplay I wrote with with Amos Poe, the no wave director. It was called La Pacifica. Preview Magazine had said it was the “best unproduced screenplay” in Hollywood, which if definitely was not. But I got a call from Andy Helfer at DC and he was launching this line of mystery [graphic] novels that eventually was A History of Violence and Road To Perdition and Green Candles… stuff like that. He said he wanted to buy La Pacifica and he asked me if I wanted to write the comic script for it, which I had never done before. But I did it and I really liked it. Then, he just offered me a job right there. He said, “Why don’t you edit all these mystery [graphic] novels we have coming out?”

So, I actually went to DC [Comics]. I loved comics when I was growing up but I never even dreamed about working in comics. I went there and it was like… oh my god, you have no idea! It was a floor of Superman, a floor of Batman… The Superman [floor] had Superman smashing through the brick wall above the receptionist’s desk. The Batman floor was Gotham. MAD Magazine was downstairs. So, it was like a dream.

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On Get Jiro:

Bourdain was always after me to do a graphic novel. He wanted to do comic books with me. He bugged me for a long time. Then, one year he was at my house for Thanksgiving and his daughter was sick on the couch. He was leaving and he cornered me, and he said, I got this idea. He told me this story about this renegade chef. It was when I had just read Mat Johnson’s Incognegro that came out from Vertigo. It was so fucking good. I wrote to Karen Berger just saying how great I thought that the book was, and she wrote back to me and said, if you ever have anything that you want to talk about, just let me know. I said, “I have this thing with Bourdain,” and she said, “Yeah, I want to see it.” So, I wrote a proposal with Tony and I sent it over, and they bought it right away. It became Get Jiro, and then we did the prequel to it too.

On Hungry Ghosts:

Yep, it was his story. He wanted to do it. We talked about it. We were going to do it at DC, and that sort of fell apart. Then I went back to Karen. Karen got an imprint at Dark Horse, and it was the same deal. I wrote her and said, congratulations. She got back and said, "Thank you, if you ever have anything…" I said, "Well, Tony’s been talking to me about this samurai game."

She bought it last May and it’s ready to go. We did the stories and the artists are on it right now. It’s an amazing moment for me. I didn’t really know these stories. I didn’t know this game, 100 Candles. And I didn’t know Kwaidan… I didn’t know these weird tales. But it was so much fun.

On his favorite story from Hungry Ghosts:

They’re so peculiar and distant from what we know as ghost stories. I would have a hard time choosing a favorite. One is called The Cow Head, and that’s a story that has cast an urban myth. It’s a story that was supposed to be so fundamentally frightening that anyone who heard it, would immediately die from fright. It was so horrible that the story was disassembled and each piece of it was sent to a different part of the world so the story could never be put back together… and of course, we’ve put it back together.

On co-authoring with Bourdain:

I sort of do the heavy lifting. I mean, he’s so busy at this point. I worked with him on Typhoid Mary (2001)…so we’ve worked together closely for years. We have a very good rapport. As for the comic books and the scripting, I’ve written so many movies and TV, I have an ease with it. So, we’ve worked from his ideas, I put it down in a rough form, I get back to him, he looks it over, he tells me what’s good and what’s bad, and we just go from there. I usually write as much as I can and then when I hit a scene that I need him, I just feed him the scene and he riffs really fast. He gets back to me really quickly. I pick and choose what I need and plug it into the script. We go back and forth that way until it’s done. I always give him last eyes.

On where they eat together:

We used to eat at lots of different places ‘cause he was working in a lot of different places. From One Fifth Avenue to like Mexican joints on the Upper Eastside. But all the last times we’ve eaten, we’ve eaten in Japanese places. I can’t speak for him but his fixation and love for Japan comes from their value of craftsmanship but also from the food. He’s very involved in that. That’s not to say we haven’t watched four gazillion yakuza movies, [because] we have.

On what he and Bourdain have coming next:

We have a couple really big projects going, but we’re both thinking that if Hungry Ghosts works, then we'll do more of these stories. There’s only eight stories in it. Two per issue and four issues. There’s a lot of room to riff and the way we set it up, it’s meant to come back. For my own pleasure, I would love to do some more of these. They’ve been incredibly fun. Writing is a solitary thing, but to be able to be thrown in with these visual artist of the caliber that Karen Berger has put us in contact with, that’s like… otherworldly. There’s an amazing pleasure and awakening when you see these construct that you have put down on paper come back to you as beautiful comic book art. I love every step along the way. I love the thumbnails, I love the pencils, I love the inks, I love the coloring, I love when it’s lettered. It hits in one pleasure centre after another.

On which of his novels would make a good graphic novel:

It would probably actually be a novel that wasn’t published that was bought by Wesley Snipes. He had a publishing company for a while and then he got into trouble with the law, and he never published [it]. I wrote the book and it was called Anything That Moves. It was set in Brooklyn and it was about a drug dealer and a boxer. It would be a great graphic novel. I always thought it was a good novel, but it’s probably not a great novel. It never saw the light of day…it never had a chance.

Written by Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose and illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli and Vanesa Del Rey, Hungry Ghosts #1 is scheduled for release on Jan. 31.