I woke up this morning to a breakthrough on my RSS reader. Bad Machinery cartoonist John Allison has defined for me a new kind of comic: a cookbook comic (or would it be comic cookbook?). Although not the first to do it, Allison's most recent Bad Machinery strip boils it down (pardon the pun) into an easy-to-digest (pardon the other pun) form.

According to Allison, this was the first of a "prospective series" about cooking that "never came to pass." Apparently, the cooking aspect of it took more time than the cartoonist expected. The plan for the series was for it to be a weekly strip with a different member of Shelley's family doing the cooking every month.

But this brings to mind: Why isn't there a comic cookbook? Bryan Lee O'Malley famously included a recipe inside the pages of Scott Pilgrim, and Japan has a cornucopia of comics about food, but they only outline specific recipes in rare occasions. It'd be an inventive way to get past the sometimes droll directions cookbooks have, but it'd take a unique mind that's good at both cartooning and explaining how to cook. If nothing else, how about a comic cookbook anthology? I'd love to read a comic by John Romita Jr. telling me how to make a mean ham sandwich.