New from Cocktail Historian David Wondrich: a Comic Book

David Wondrich has done more than anyone else to uncover the forgotten history of cocktails and spirits. He was the drink columnist at Esquire magazine from 2000 to 2016, during which time he revealed the origins of popular drinks that had since fallen into disrepute, and informed us on how making them with better ingredients like fresh juices and historically accurate spirits like genever could be revelatory. He wrote the book Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar that told the history of the first bartender’s guide and detailed the drinks of the 1800s. Then he took a step back in history to write his next book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl.

Imbibe! Punch and The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails

Each of these books not only furthered our understanding of historic cocktails, they inspired bars around the world to change their menus, brands to recreate vintage spirits like old tom gin and crème de violette that hadn’t been produced for decades, and bartenders to experiment with lost techniques like making oleo saccharum.

In what felt like the culmination of his decades of work, he edited The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, a nearly 900-page book released in 2021 of global cocktail and spirits history and technology. Read The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails review.

Four years later, his next project was announced: a comic book to be published in September 2025. Titled The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On (September 23, 2025, Ten Speed Graphic), this one comes in at a mere 176 pages, with Dean Kotz as illustrator.

The comic book format wasn’t his idea. He said in an email, “[Publisher] Ten Speed asked me if I'd be interested in doing this as a part of their "Comic Book Story of X" series (ie.g., beer, baseball, etc.) I hadn't thought about doing this exact thing before, but I had at one point thought about doing a comic book based on bar life, and some of that wormed its way in to this. The only such thing I've done before was Artie the Angry Dinosaur, which my friend and I cranked out one rainy afternoon to amuse our kids, back when they were little.”

Shorter and Shinier and Yet Expansive

Not everyone interested in learning the history of cocktails will be willing to pick up a 900-page encyclopedia written alphabetically rather than chronologically, so the comic book format should speak to a wider audience than his previous work. (It probably won’t hurt marketing efforts that the character of “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski is visible on the cover illustration.) But with less than 200 pages and pictures on all of them, is this book a dumbed-down history of the cocktail from one of our smartest cocktail writers?

It is not.

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail focusses mostly on mixed drinks, the people who created and promoted them, and the places in which they were invented and served. It does not include too much nerdy detail about spirits production, but there are a page or two in some chapters explaining spirit categories and barrel aging to keep things interesting. There are also 30 recipes in the book – most of them demonstrated in comic form by two bartender characters who make an appearance at the end of each chapter. But it is a cocktail history book rather than a cocktail recipe book.

Wondrich begins the text noting that mixed drinks have existed long before distillation did, but his main narrative starts in the 1600s - the era of global exploration, exploitation, and punch. He turns to America and iced drinks, the creation and spread of the cocktail around the country, and the life of bartender Jerry Thomas. Then we follow as the cocktail heads overseas to London and Paris and far away ports like Singapore and Cairo, and how drinkers travelled to places like Cuba and the Bahamas during Prohibition. After that we move toward the more modern era, tracing the bright spot of tiki drinks amidst the dark ages of mixology from the 1960s to the 1990s. The final chapters cover the craft cocktail renaissance, impact of the internet, neo-speakeasies, and even a bit about the impact of covid-19 lockdowns on drinks at home and to go.

Along the way there are epic drinking contests, the etymology of the word “cocktail,” the rise of vermouth, the impact of the two World Wars on drinking, and a lot more that places what happened in the history of mixology into context of what was going on in the world at large.

Wondrich said, “I like how the comic book format forced me to take a long view; to not get bogged in details or alternative theories. I had to pick a story and commit to it. And I had to really focus on the storytelling; on the narrative through line. To do that, I had to think about things I usually didn't think about until I could explain them clearly. It was an interesting challenge.”

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail by David Wondrich will be published in September 2025.