Comics and Graphic Novels Featuring Food and Cooking

This month we’re taking inspiration from Thanksgiving and serving up comics and graphic novels featuring food! From baking to imbibing to hot dogs to haute cuisine, food, cooking and eating play central roles in each of these books.

For Readers

 Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic, book cover

Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic by Wauter Mannaert

Yasmina isn't like the other kids in her city. Maybe it's the big chef hat she wears. Or the fact that she stuffs her dad's lunchbox full of spring rolls instead of peanut butter and jelly. She might be an oddball, but no one can deny that Yasmina has a flair for food. All she needs to whip up a gourmet meal is a recipe from her cookbook and fresh vegetables from the community garden.

But everything changes when the garden is bulldozed and replaced with a strange new crop of potatoes. Her neighbors can't get enough of these spuds! And after just one bite their behavior changes--they slobber, chase cats, and howl at the moon. What's the secret ingredient in these potatoes that has everyone acting like a bunch of crazed canines? Yasmina needs to find a cure, and fast!



Maya Makes a Mess, book cover

Maya Makes a Mess by Rutu Modan

In the midst of a family dinner with her scolding parents, Maya receives a very unexpected invitation to dine with the queen. Suddenly, her messy manners are put to the ultimate test and she begins to improvise her very own set of rules, with uproarious results. Filled with humor and exquisitely imagined detail, this book by Eisner Award–winner Rutu Modan is bound to turn every child into a voracious reader.



Space Battle Lunchtime, book cover

Space Battle Lunchtime by Natalie Riess

Earth baker Peony gets the deal of a lifetime when she agrees to be a contestant on the Universe's hottest reality TV show, Space Battle Lunchtime! But that was before she knew that it shoots on location... on a spaceship... and her alien competitors don't play nice! Does Peony really have what it takes to be the best cook in the Galaxy? Tune in and find out!



Yummy: A History of Desserts, book cover

Yummy: A History of Desserts by Victoria Grace Elliot

Have you ever wondered who first thought to freeze cream? Or when people began making sweet pastry shells to encase fruity fillings? Food sprite Peri is excited to show you the delicious history of sweets while taking you around the world and back!

The team-up that made ice cream cones!

The mistake that made brownies!

Learn about and taste the true stories behind everyone's favorite treats, paired with fun and easy recipes to try at home. After all, sweets--and their stories--are always better when they're shared!



More

Apocalypse Taco, book cover
Brave Chef Brianna, book cover
Maker Comics: Bake Like a Pro, book cover
Rutabaga the Adventure Chef, book cover
Tea Dragon Society, book cover
Bake Sale, book cover
Measuring Up, book cover
Fluffy, Fluffy Cinnamoroll, book cover
Patrick Eats His Peas and Other Stories, book cover


For Teens

Bloom, book cover

Bloom by Kevin Panetta

Now that high school is over, Ari is dying to move to the big city with his ultra-hip band—if he can just persuade his dad to let him quit his job at their struggling family bakery. Though he loved working there as a kid, Ari cannot fathom a life wasting away over rising dough and hot ovens. But while interviewing candidates for his replacement, Ari meets Hector, an easygoing guy who loves baking as much as Ari wants to escape it. As they become closer over batches of bread, love is ready to bloom . . . that is, if Ari doesn’t ruin everything.

Writer Kevin Panetta and artist Savanna Ganucheau concoct a delicious recipe of intricately illustrated baking scenes and blushing young love, in which the choices we make can have terrible consequences, but the people who love us can help us grow.



Relish, book cover

Relish by Lucy Knisley

A vibrant, food-themed memoir from beloved indie cartoonist, Lucy Knisley.

Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions.

A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a book for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product.



Flavor, book cover

Flavor by Joe Keatinge

Image Comics' most delicious Young Adult Culinary Fantasy is served up in a collected edition!

Within a strange walled city, an unlicensed chef discovers a mystery that threatens to end it all. Join JOSEPH KEATINGE (GLORY, SHUTTER) and WOOK JIN CLARK (Adventure Time: The Flip Side) on this culinary epic adventure--FLAVOR--where chefs are the ultimate celebrity and food is the most valued commodity. The high-stakes competition of Hunger Games collides with the lush, MIYAZAKI-esque worldbuilding in this delectable new ongoing series featuring culinary consulting and an introduction by ALI BOUZARI, renowned food scientist and author of the IACP Award-winning cookbook Ingredient: Unveiling the Essential Elements of Food.



Seconds, book cover

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Katie’s got it pretty good. She’s a talented young chef, she runs a successful restaurant, and she has big plans to open an even better one. Then, all at once, progress on the new location bogs down, her charming ex-boyfriend pops up, her fling with another chef goes sour, and her best waitress gets badly hurt. And just like that, Katie’s life goes from pretty good to not so much. What she needs is a second chance. Everybody deserves one, after all—but they don’t come easy. Luckily for Katie, a mysterious girl appears in the middle of the night with simple instructions for a do-it-yourself do-over: 1. Write your mistake. 2. Ingest one mushroom. 3. Go to sleep. 4. Wake anew.

And just like that, all the bad stuff never happened, and Katie is given another chance to get things right. She’s also got a dresser drawer full of magical mushrooms—and an irresistible urge to make her life not just good, but perfect. Too bad it’s against the rules. But Katie doesn’t care about the rules—and she’s about to discover the unintended consequences of the best intentions


More

My Love Story!!, book cover
Delicious in Dungeon, book cover
Meal, book cover
Food Wars, book cover
Check Please, book cover
Kitchen Princess, book cover
Sweetness & Lightning, book cover
Archie & Friends Thanksgiving Feast, book cover
Toriko, book cover
I Was Their American Dream, book cover
Restaurant to Another World, book cover
Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu, book cover


For Adults

Cook Korean! A Comic Book with Recipes, book cover

Cook Korean! A Comic Book with Recipes by Robin Ha

Fun to look at and easy to use, this unique combination of cookbook and graphic novel is the ideal introduction to cooking Korean cuisine at home. Robin Ha’s colorful and humorous one-to three-page comics fully illustrate the steps and ingredients needed to bring more than sixty traditional (and some not-so-traditional) dishes to life.

In these playful but exact recipes, you’ll learn how to create everything from easy kimchi (mak kimchi) and soy garlic beef over rice (bulgogi dupbap) to seaweed rice rolls (gimbap) and beyond. Friendly and inviting, Cook Korean! is perfect for beginners and seasoned cooks alike.

Each chapter includes personal anecdotes and cultural insights from Ha, providing an intimate entry point for those looking to try their hand at this cuisine.



Over Easy, book cover

Over Easy by Mimi Pond

A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the 1970s.

Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story. After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles. Gradually she realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions.



Get Jiro, book cover

Get Jiro by Anthony Bourdain

In a not-too-distant future L.A. where master chefs rule the town like crime lords and people literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants, a bloody culinary war is raging. On one side, the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world into exotic delights. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef, known to decapitate patrons who dare request a California Roll, or who stir wasabi into their soy sauce. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. Jiro, however has bigger ideas, and in the end, no chef may be left alive!



The Delicacy, book cover

The Delicacy by James Albon

Tulip and his brother Rowan have left the simple comforts of their small Scottish island with a plan: to grow organic vegetables in a market garden, and to open a restaurant to bring these wholesome culinary delights to London. The world of fine dining seems an impossibly competitive place... until they discover a mysteriously, scrumptious new mushroom that brings diners in droves, catapulting their small restaurant to success beyond their wildest dreams. Now, pressured by the demands of a hungry city, Tulip is desperate to crack the secret of the mushroom's growth. But must he sacrifice his ideals, his integrity, and even his own brother, to feed his own ambition?



More

What Did You Eat Yesterday?, book cover
Japanese Cooking with Manga , book cover
The Comic Book History of Beer , book cover
Hot Dog Taste Test, book cover
French Milk, book cover
Dodin-Bouffant: Gourmet Extraordinaire, book cover
Chew Vol 1: Taster's Choice, book cover
The Customer is Always Wrong, book cover
Anthony Bourdain's Hungry Ghosts, book cover
Onion Skin, book cover
Starve, book cover
Let's Make Ramen!, book cover
To Drink and to Eat Vol. 1: Tales and Techniques from a French Kitchen, book cover
Dirt Candy, book cover