Write What You Know, And Then Stop: Wolverine: In The Flesh Review

Editor’s Note: And one last quick review before the comic stores open today…

When I was younger, I was a professional stand-up comedian. I started almost exactly 20 years ago, performing for the first time in the back of a shitty bar called Headliners off of the main drag in Buckhead, Georgia (it’s not there anymore) in mid-August, 1993, hundreds of miles away from anyone who knew me, so that if I completely sucked and couldn’t face doing it anymore, no one would know that I stunk up the joint.

Well, I did completely suck, but I got better over the course of years, going from shitty college bar open mike to the back rooms of Chinese restaurants 20 minutes off of any highway in northern New England, honing my craft enough to reach the point where I could do some opening in bigger rooms in Boston. It took me years to get there… and during that time, there was nothing that pissed me off more than hearing that some bubblegumming fallen D-List celebrity or maybe some scandal celebrity try to string out their 15 minutes of fame by trying a stand-up.

Year after year, I’d hear it: Kato Kaelin was doing stand-up! Screech from Saved By The Bell was doing a weekend at the Comedy Palace! John Wayne Bobbit was doing two appearances at – wait, that was porn he did… but that’s not the point. The point is that it pissed me off that these celebrities thought that they could just announce that they were comedians and just do the thing that I had spent ten years going from crappy club to crappy club, eating shitty food and going without sleep while driving through the night, learning how to do well enough to reach the bottom rungs of the ladder of success! With my only consolation being that after those initial big announcements of their new careers in comedy… you never fucking heard of any of them again.

All of which is a long way to go to say that celebrity chef and Food Network personality Chris Cosentino has written a Wolverine comic book for Marvel, and this is my review of it.

Brain Bleach: Chef Chris Cosentino To Write Digital Wolverine One Shot.

Somehow I missed it back in April when it was announced at WonderCon that Incanto chef Chris Cosentino had been asked by Marvel to write an issue of Wolverine. Cosentino says that Marvel Senior VP Of Creator And Content Development, C.B. Cebulski, and he tweet a lot and that while Cebulski was a guest at Incanto he asked Cosentino if he’s be interested in writing a comic book. Cosentino says that his comic will be set in San Francisco, be food-centric, and have lots of giant robots. The book will officially be titled Wolverine: The Fifth Quarter (“the fifth quarter” being a nod to the food most commonly associated with Cosentino, offal) and the art will be done by Tim Seely (Hack/Slash).

With Anthony Bourdain set to release Get Jiro! in July, one does have to ask if this is going to turn into a growing trend. Can we expect one shot publicity stunts from other celebrity chefs? Would Emeril write Gambit? Gordon Ramsay pen The Hulk? Should we look forward to a Flash tale from Rachel “30 Minute Meals” Ray? I’m sure the answer is most likely “no”. At least I hope so. Maybe Bourdain and Cosentino will prove me wrong, but I’ve got a fifth of Old Crow that says we’re going to see exposition heavy text and a story that leans heavily on the art. Hell. I’m willing to drink Crow.

So, why is this back in the news today? Well, over on The Daily Meal, Cosentino has a video interview in which he promotes his new cookbook, Beginnings: My Way To Start a Meal, and also talks about his comic book at around 1:35 or so.

Wolverine: The Fifth Quarter is set for this June as a digital release.