(Episode Three: choppin' brocolli.)

I first learned of Iron Wok Jan! (ComicsOne) from a comment by manga fan Shawn Fumo discussing manga diversity. A comic series devoted to culinary competition: if there's any topic removed from the themes and concerns of mainstream American comics, it's the simple act of eating (unless you're talking about a world-spanning entity, capable of devouring whole planets - or a cartoony glutton like Little Lotta or Jughead). In mainstream comic terms, the act of food preparation is even more mundane. Though cooking has appeared as a subject in magical realist fiction (Like Water for Chocolate) and in character-driven movies like Big Night, you've got to wonder how anyone could make it exciting in manga format. Oh, look, he's cutting up more vegetables!

I'm not a die-hard foodee: only show on The Food Network I've viewed more than once is Unwrapped, a series that's primarily devoted to candy and junk food. I've never made it all the way through a half hour of Iron Chef. But Shinji Saljyo's Iron Wok Jan! ("Supervisor: Keiko Oyama," the cover also tells me, which I assume means that either Oyama edits the series or is a smiling figurehead like Stan Lee) delights me and in ways I wouldn't have expected when I first heard of this series.

Jan! is set at the Gobancha Restaurant in Ginza, which we're told is the foremost Chinese restaurant in Tokyo. Into this bastion of top-flight cookery comes Jan Akiyama, a "very skilled yet arrogant chef" who's been drilled in the art of Chinese cooking by his harsh taskmaster grandfather. Announcing that he's the "one and only king of Chinese cooking," Jan instantly alienates the rest of the kitchen staff, including buxom trainee Kiriko, niece to the restaurant's head chef and a talented cook on her own. Cooking, Jan asserts, is all about competition, but Kiriko (who has a pretty healthy ego of her own, we soon learn) begs to differ. No, she asserts, it's about heart. A real Men Are from Mars, Women Venus conflict. At one point, the two trade so many one word barbs that you just know romance is inevitable.

Much of the first volume is devoted to episodes where Jan and Kiriko demonstrate their expertise. Each display of skill is treated like a showdown (you feel like whistling a Ennio Morricone theme every time one of the cooks gets challenged), with much aggressive posturing and braggadocio. ("I'll make you realize that cooking is about heart and not competition," Kiriko proclaims at one point, looking as if she'd like to cram that lesson down Jan's throat, while Jan is shown tauntingly laughing at his cooking inferiors.) But the best of them are also cooking puzzles: how, for instance, can Jan cook an odorless stir-fry dish using pork liver, "the smelliest internal organ"?

In a way, the chapters of Iron Wok Jan! are structured like an old Silver Age superhero comic: we have a problem and our cooking hero solves it, then explains how s/he solved it to the other chefs and the reader. (Only thing that differentiates it from a Mort Weisinger-edited tale is the absence of a panel showing the lead winking at the reader.) In two chapters, for instance, both Jan and Kiriko are separately challenged by a mercenary food critic to serve him something he will not be able to identify. They both succeed, though Kiriko does so in a way designed to preserve the old fraud's dignity, while Jan naturally rubs his nose in it, making an enemy of the critic in the process.