The Comic Book History of the Cocktail

SPIRITED AWARD WINNER • A graphic novel history of the cocktail—from prehistoric wassail to our current boozy renaissance—featuring 20 recipes by drinks historian, Daily Beast columnist, and award-winning author David Wondrich.

There's no better writer to tell the colorful history of cocktails than David Wondrich, widely considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on cocktails and a driving force behind the early-twenty-first-century revival in the classic American art of mixing drinks.

In The Comic Book Story of the Cocktail, Wondrich teams up with comics artist Dean Kotz to trace the evolution of the cocktail. Beginning with the ancient days of wassail and hypocras (mixed drinks based on wine and beer), they narrate a tumultuous and vibrant history that stretches through the Age of Exploration, the boozier parts of the Enlightenment and America’s hurly-burly nineteenth century, to the Disco years, the Cosmo years, and the modern Cocktail Revolution.

Kotz’s intricate, masterful drawings illustrate stories that have never been properly told and introduce key characters who haven’t yet received their due. Nearly thirty recipes round out this spirited account, featuring accurate versions of old classics and a generous selection of secret weapons from the mixologist’s vest pocket. So, settle in with your libation of choice and prepare to meet the good, the bad, and the boozy in this lively and jam-packed tale.

As the drinks columnist for Esquire from 2000 to 2016 and the Daily Beast from 2016 to 2022, David Wondrich was perfectly placed not only to observe the modern cocktail revolution, but also to help push it along. A former English professor with a PhD in comparative literature, he turned his studies to good use in writing books such as the James Beard Award–winning Imbibe!, a biography-with-recipes of pioneering bartender Jerry Thomas, and editing The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, which the American Library Association deemed the best reference book of 2021. On top of that, Wondrich has helped to train literally thousands of bartenders; been a television guest of Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow; partnered in developing several award-winning spirits (plus his own line of barware); and been voted the #3 most influential person in the bar world by a thousand of his peers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and Trieste, Italy.

Originally from Northeastern Pennsylvania, Dean Kotz studied painting at West Chester University and has been working professionally in comics since 2009.