User blog:Porterfield/Cooks in the Comics

In 1977, Stan Lee presented The Mighty Marvel Superheroes' Cookbook, which featured recipes for dishes loosely tied to our crime-fighting heroes (http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/05/24/marvel-comics-cookebook/ hilarious samples here). Since then, the long stretch of connecting comic books to cooking has been avoided, until now of course. A recent slew of comic book/culinary crossovers has resurrected the spirit of the 1970s cookbook, only this time around, the superheroes aren't exchanging capes for aprons. Instead, famous gastronomes are teaming up with superheroes in a handful of random adventures that prove the old notion of getting out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat, even if you're a super villain.

Food & Wine's Comic C.B. Cebulski and his Marvel team collaborated with Food & Wine to create this mini-comic. In the comic, two editors and two test kitchen cooks from the magazine team up with Spider-Man to prevent the Green Goblin from stealing their coveted "super-power bar" recipe. I don't know how many Food & Wine readers also read comics, and vice versa, but it's a collaboration worth celebrating.

Chris Cosentino's Personal Comic Cosentino is the renowned chef of San Francisco's Incanto, but as a comic book nerd, he's always had a dream to write his own. Fortunately, he's famous on the food scene, and the people at Marvel love to eat (they even have a foodie club called Foodies of Ol' Marvel or FOOM). Cosentino got the hookup and created his own comic, becoming the sidekick of Wolverine in a fight against a human-butchering mutant.

Eli Kirshtein in Spider-Man In the digital comic Spider-Man: A Meal to Die For, former Top Chef contestant Kirshtein teams up with Spider-Man to fight Mysterio. Kirshtein and Cosentino aren't the first famous chefs to take comic form, as Anthony Bourdain and Amanda Cohen have also had the privilege.

A manga series about wine Japanese writer Tadashi Agi created The Drops of God, a popular manga series about a wine critic who must find 12 wines sent from the Gods in order to inherit his father's estate. Although it's not from Marvel, the series is extremely popular and probably the most legitimate, thoughtfully-planned connection between comics and gastronomy. An English version comes out this month.