Last week I finally made a deal to write a cookbook, something I never thought I’d do in my life. My problem has always been that I couldn’t think of a reason to add yet another cookbook to the already crowded shelves, but that all changed about a year ago when I had an idea for the kind of cookbook that would work for Dirt Candy: a graphic novel cookbook. I’m not sure if “graphic novel” is the best term here since it’s a cookbook and not a novel, but that’s the best description I can come up with.

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I’m working with Ryan Dunlavey, the award-winning artist behind the amazing Action Philosophers (a non-fiction comic book about the lives of the great philosophers, written by Fred Van Lente) and the entire cookbook will be in comic book form. Like this:

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The Dirt Candy Cookbook will be published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, who are the folks behind Martha Stewart’s cookbooks, David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook and the Lee Brothers cookbooks. I’m really psyched to be working with them.

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And yes, there will be recipes:

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All this artwork is from the book proposal and it’s all by Ryan. The Dirt Candy Cookbook itself (and no, that title is definitely not set in stone) looks like it will be hitting shelves in Summer 2012.

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