A new comic starring Aquaman, Superman...and me!

Announcing Taste of Justice, a new comic by the brilliant Andrew Aydin

Hope you all had a nice holiday weekend…did you cook anything good? Maybe you didn’t cook anything, and instead made a tiradito (or a ceviche or an aguachile?)

Today I’m so excited to announce a new project (you’re the first ones to know about it!) that I’ve been working on…a new comic strip! It’s part of a new series from DC Comics called Taste of Justice, stories about superheroes learning to cook (like Flash learning to make Christmas cookies!), written by the brilliant comic book writer Andrew Aydin. Andrew and I recently connected through our mutual friend Steve Orlando, who wrote Feeding Dangerously with me, a graphic novel about the work of World Central Kitchen.

Here’s a panel preview of my new comic strip…you’ll have to wait until July 16 for the full thing, but I promise it will be worth it! (art by Domo Stanton)

Andrew has an incredible story…he was working with the legendary US Representative John Lewis from Georgia when he found out that Congressman Lewis was a fan of a comic strip about Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks. Andrew suggested to Congressman Lewis that he should write his own comic book—and they ended up writing MARCH together, one of the most award-winning graphic novels of all time, about the civil rights movement. If you haven’t read it, I think you need to pick it up…it would convince anyone that comics are a super powerful medium for telling stories.

If you haven't read MARCH yet...what are you waiting for? (Art by Nate Powell)

Andrew lives in western North Carolina, so he was also a huge support for the World Central Kitchen team when we responded to the devastating Hurricane Helene last September. He connected our team with city officials around the area to make sure communities were getting hot meals—a true lifeline for many people cut off from help by the flooding.

So when Andrew approached me with an idea to write a comic strip about the DC comic book universe characters PLUS food…of course I wanted to be involved. And better yet…I would get to be a character in it!

My team had a conversation with Andrew about the project and his work—take a read and get excited for Taste of Justice to come out next week!

What was the origin of the project?

This collaboration started when I was plotting out ‘Taste of Justice’ and we kept kicking around the idea that it would be fun to have real chefs make appearances in the series. The sky was the limit because no one had ever tried a series like this before and DC was game to experiment so I talked with my editors about who our dream chefs would be. José was at the top of the list. I have been friends with Steve Orlando for many years and knew he had collaborated with José on Feeding Dangerously so I texted Steve to see what he thought. That led to being connected to Team José, which took a detour when Hurricane Helene hit my community as we worked to connect World Central Kitchen with affected communities. I think we became trauma bonded in that experience because everything came together, and I knew I wanted to bring José into ‘Taste of Justice’ and show this whole other side of what superheroes do and what that means in the context of food and care.

What was your first comic book memory?

My first comic book memory is reading comics at my grandmother’s house, just down the road from where I live now. She bought me my first comic book at the Piggly Wiggly. I remember looking at the spinner rack and my grandmother noticing and saying You can have one. I got Uncanny X-men #317 in case you’re curious.

And it’s a strange coincidence because the parking lot where that Piggly Wiggly once was became a FEMA staging area in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene. It’s odd how life comes full circle sometimes.

How did you get started in writing comics?

The late Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin (photo by Julie KC Kim)

I started writing comics the day I convinced John Lewis to write a comic about himself. I bugged him about it for weeks after I had the idea. He once told a reporter that when I first suggested the idea, he thought I had lost my mind. But it grew on him, and I really believe it was his wife Lillian who convinced him. She was a librarian and loved books. And she always looked out for me. And it came out of the blue. I never thought I would write a comic or a graphic novel, I just thought he should. But one day we were campaigning in Southwest Atlanta, and I mentioned the idea again, and he said, ‘I’ll do it—but only if you write it with me.” That’s how I started writing comics.

Who’s your favorite character to write?

I can’t say John Lewis, right? That’s not fair.

I think my favorite character to write is Wally West (Flash). Well, Wally and Kyle Rayner (Green Lantern). I grew up reading Ron Marz and Darryl Banks run on Green Lantern that introduced Kyle as well as Mike Wieringo and Mark Waid’s run on Flash. Those two were my favorites. I read them every month. And even though they didn’t cross over in the series at the time, I always thought they would be great friends. So that’s how I write them. They go through challenges, they have quirks and idiosyncrasies, and in some ways, they help remind me of how I thought the world and friendship should be when I was a kid reading comics. They help me remember to have fun writing comics. I’m lucky to be doing this. I have checked off so many bucket list items I’m having to make up new ones. Because my goals as a kid were simple—make enough money not to be poor, make my mother proud, travel, and be happy. All of that has come about. I have had some hard times, everyone does, but what defines you is how you bounce back. I’m so lucky because I bounced back into having the absolute dream job for that kid I once was.

Why did you want to write food stories?

My mother passed in 2017, and I inherited her farm. It had gotten a little rough while she was sick, and after she passed, and after Congressman Lewis passed, I really threw myself into fixing it up and getting it running again. It’s a simple farm, nothing too complex, but I found a lot of joy in my garden. It was my mother’s first, and I replanted it and worked it, and got pretty good at growing fruits and vegetables. But then I realized I had no idea what to do with them once I grew them. You can only eat so many tomato sandwiches. So, I started trying to learn to cook—something I wasn’t taught when I was young.

My mother would kill me for telling this story, but we used to joke she was a Cajun chef because everything she made was blackened (clearly we didn’t know much about Cajun cooking at the time). She was working so much to keep us afloat, there just wasn’t time to cook much. And when there was, it always seemed like something took attention, something that just had to be done, and then, oops, the chicken is a little crispy—you know?

I bought a few cookbooks and tried to follow them, but they read like computer code to me. I couldn’t decipher them. And then I tried YouTube videos and they move so fast and it’s so hard to get them to go back to right where you need it and then an ad pops up and pretty soon I’m a Cajun chef too. And I thought, there has to be something better than this for people like me. Why not a comic?

And I was becoming more and more interested in food more broadly. Food is at the core of everything in our lives, whether we know it or not. Where we live is shaped by where the food grows. Brutal wars, slavery, trade—all of it can be linked back to food in some way. And I love history. Reading about food and seeing it through that lens helped me better understand the parts of “why” things happened. At our core, we’re all just animals trying to feed ourselves, and yet human beings have turned food into art—why is that? How? The answers to those questions define our humanity.

What else are you working on right now?

Right now I’m running a small publishing company, Good Trouble Comics, and writing a graphic memoir with Sallie Ann Robinson—an amazing Gullah Chef who some people might know as Ethel in Pat Conroy’s novel, The Water is Wide. It’s about her life, the history of the Gullah Geechee people in the low country, and her home island, Daufuskie. We call the book FUSKIE and it should be released in 2027 by Ten Speed Graphic.

Cover by David Marquez and Laura Martin

I am also working on comics about Appalachia. The region has been overlooked for so long. It has been consistently defined by outsiders, people just passing through, people hoping to exploit or profit but not help. So I’m trying to change that through a book we call ‘Islands in the Sky’ about what happened before, during, and after Hurricane Helene. Each chapter is co-written by a local survivor of the disaster about their own first-hand lived experiences. We are hoping it will create a unique record accessible to the widest possible audience. We are crowdfunding the final production on Kickstarter right now. We could use everyone’s support. We hope this becomes a model for both creating accessible records of difficult contemporary events as well as giving the power of controlling their story back to communities that have overlooked and exploited. Reading some of the early scripts, these are powerful stories. I’ve heard it said before, but it really is true—Appalachia is home to amazing storytellers. And I hope this book helps more people that.

This is José again…what do you think? Are you excited to see more about what Andrew and I have cooking up? I’ll give you a hint…Aquaman and I are making something that we’ve been talking about recently, that doesn’t require any cooking…I guess you’ll have to wait until next week to see what it could be!