Each chapter closes with a thematically appropriate recipe, or in one case, a visual handbook of sorts for navigating a gourmet cheese shop: And another fairly common childhood story, the trauma of a city kid transplanted to the country, in Knisley’s hands becomes an explanation of her love for foie gras, the gourmet delicacy made by force-feeding geese:īonus: you get a cookbook with your stories.

Knisley’s teenage rebel phase, for example, chronicles how she ate junk food in front of her horrified foodie parents. Even the story of her own gestation is spun in the context of her mother’s main job during her pregnancy: managing the cheese section of a gourmet food store.įood focuses otherwise run-of-the mill chapters about growing up, college, travel, family, and friendship. Knisley grew up with a chef and a food snob for parents, so no chapter of her life exists without a food-related association. “Relish” is about place and time and story, not just about that rumble in your belly. Knisley’s introductory chapter sets the scene for the whole collection: “Relish” is a comics memoir about food and youth that strikes the perfect balance between gesture and immersion.

Comics are suggestive yet continuous-the frames carry the memory of tastes, smells and warmth, yet only gesture rather than try to recreate. A comic like Lucy Knisley’s “Relish,” however, encourages a relationship with food, rather than simply manipulating or overwhelming you with your basest impulses. OK, yes, just using words to describe the power of such an image certainly works pretty well, because I could really use some cake right now.īut over-the-top images like that emphasize what you’re missing, what you need, which is why advertisers love them: you’ll spend money to fill that hole. Even Scott McCloud’s classic comic about comics-his theoretical work “Understanding Comics”-uses a cooking scene to illustrate the powers unique to the genre:Īs the smells and sounds of cooking waft between the frames, it doesn’t take more than a few visuals to immerse you into Mom’s kitchen-just a couple of squiggly lines from the soup pot evoke not only hunger, but also warmth, and perhaps a sense of comfort.Īdvertisers are certainly aware of the power of images to trigger our senses of taste and smell: a single photo of a burger, a cookie, can send someone on a midnight run to the store, and a slow-motion ad of someone dipping a fork into a piece of chocolate cake, and slowly, slowly moving it to her mouth. Originally published on October 14, 2013įood and cooking always figure prominently within comics.

Relish by lucy knisley