Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook

With snarky humor and rollicking curlicue art, Eisner nominee Hayden (The Story of My Tits) crafts a food memoir that doubles as a tongue-in-cheek cookbook. Faced with the task of getting family dinner on the table every night, Hayden admits she doesn’t always cook with love: “Jesus, didn’t I feed you freaks last night? How can you be hungry again?!” Her recipes, which are interspersed with autobiographical comics flashing back to her troubled history with home-cooked meals since childhood, include “A Nauseating 1960s Buffet,” “Get Stuffed Zucchini” (made from a disappointing home garden harvest), and “Personal Power Burgers with the Caramelized Snakes of Your Own Failure.” The instructions for “Spaghetti and Musketballs” include “don’t forget to garnish with fresh homegrown anger, impatience, bitterness, and plenty of resentment, to taste.” Her attempt at 1970s hippie cuisine goes up in flames, a home pizza kit blows up her oven, and embracing Wicca does nothing for her inner earth goddess at the kitchen hearth. Still, she continues to be seduced by beatific women on the covers of trendy cookbooks who promise, “I am just so enfierced to help women like you become... women like me!” Hayden’s panels burst with energy, and she fills her margins with vegetables, herbs, pots and pans, and ornery kids. It’s Erma Bombeck by way of Julie Doucet. Readers’ stomachs will ache with laughter. (Nov.)