Review by C.J. Bunce
People drink booze to celebrate and they drink booze when they’re down. Publishers have been releasing several new takes on mixed drinks and cocktails recently. Now comic book creator Sarah Becan is adding to the mix. She says she loves creating comics as recipe books because she believes it makes them more approachable and accessible. She also likes drawing food and drinks. So she put together a new recipe book, Let’s Make Cocktails! A Comic Book Cocktail Book, now available here at Amazon. The book is a giant graphic work of nonfiction that provides simple and straightforward explanations of all you need to know to make mixed drinks. She includes the tools, the components, and all the how-to knowledge anyone needs to make some of the best known drinks, while also incorporating lesser known cocktails and international flavors. For those interested in all things booze, and finding recipes both historical and modern, this new guide pairs well with previous books reviewed here at borg, including TCM’s Forbidden Cocktails (reviewed here), Dungeons & Dragons’ Puncheons and Flagons (reviewed here), Noir Bar (reviewed here), Star Trek Cocktails (reviewed here), The Comic Book History of the Cocktail (reviewed here), and for a fiction twist, James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress (reviewed here) and Dashiell Hammett’s original Nick and Nora story, The Thin Man (reviewed here).
Let’s Make Cocktails! may look familiar to borg readers as it is similar in look and vibe to many of the recent cookbooks we’ve reviewed in comic book form, and especially The Comic Book History of the Cocktail, also from publisher Ten Speed Graphic. But that book was about history and lore, and Let’s Make Cocktails! is a guide for aspiring bartenders. It also may look familiar to readers of Let’s Make Bread!, which was also illustrated by Sarah Becan. It looks similar and follows the same style of educating readers and providing easy to absorb instructions.
Take a look inside the book, courtesy of Ten Speed Graphic:
Whether you take it shaken, or stirred, or muddled, or you don’t drink but want to know better what authors like Ian Fleming and Dashiell Hammett have been talking about all these years, pick up your copy of Let’s Make Cocktails! A Comic Book Cocktail Book, available now here at Amazon, or add it to your pull list at Elite Comics or your local comic shop.
