Crown Heights, Brooklyn's Dining Scene Inspires Comic Book

Eat your, er, heart out. 

The most graphic page of Meghan Turbitt's new comic book, #FoodPorn, has the 30-year-old redhead arrayed on a counter at Sushi Tatsu 2 in Brooklyn with edibles covering all the risky parts — so it's not too risky. Turbitt says she was inspired to ink the 32-page comic by dining experiences around her neighborhood. A taco vendor's apron at Gueros on Prospect Place in Crown Heights,  resplendent with bits of spicy food, looks too good not to eat. So she does.

A rather unsavory pizza-tosser at Rosco's on Franklin Avenue becomes more attractive moment by moment as the gorgeous pie he's constructing moves closer to her climactic devouring of it.

Less savory — but funny — is her memory of the name her mother used to call the plastic bins of corned beef hash at the diner the family owned in Warwick, R.I. "She used to call it her 'Jeffrey,'" Turbitt told me when I interviewed her for my podcast New Books in Food  "She kept it in these huge plastic bins like Jeffrey Dahmer did with dead bodies."

Turbitt uses comics to do what the medium can do better than nearly any other: allow the creator to follow his or her id to its absolute expression. Diners are a tough business. Gallows humor is to be expected. And a childhood of eating Jeffrey seems an ideal way to spawn a comic book author. "I love corned beef hash," Turbitt laughed.