Step One

Dad and the S.O. each sent me a link to a new comic they had heard about, and I hadn't. One was Smoke and Mirrors from IDW about a stage magician who's transported to a dimension where real magic is the norm. One of the "hooks" of the book, though, is that there will be actual tricks in the book itself. Teachable magic with instructions in comic book form. (I think I may have heard the title before and assumed it was a continuation of Speakeasy's Smoke & Mirror from 2005.)

The other comic is The Dirt Candy Comic Book Cookbook. Dirt Candy is a vegetarian restaurant in New York City, and chef/owner Amanda Cohen is doing a cookbook in graphic novel form with artist Ryan Dunlavey. She says the "novel" part is a bit misleading since it's not really a novel, but there will be recipes explained with sequential art.

The notion of using comics as a instructional tool is nothing new. The 1940s comics I'm researching for my next book include pages like this...

And, of course, those airline safety brochures are really just comics as well. (Though often badly done.)

I'm quite pleased to see there are more such books coming out in the near future, but I'm curious what might have sparked the seemingly recent interest. The whole "comics are popular now" thing has been around for a few years, so I doubt it's that. Unless, of course, there are a lot more instructional comics that have come out that I never heard about. After all, both of these new examples only just came to my attention today, but news of them has been out there for at least a month or two. Maybe there's this whole genre of instructional comics that "the industry" isn't talking about. Books that show up in the cooking or DIY sections.

Something to keep my eyes out for...

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