Cuisine Chinoise: Five Tales of Food and Life
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the mind of prodigy cartoonist Zao Dao comes Cuisine Chinoise: Five Tales of Life and Food, featured here in English for the first time!
From insects looking for a meal made of ghosts, to a man named Yuzi who's passion for cooking is the only hope of maintaining a family legacy, these wonderfully illustrated stories explore the rich and humorous lives of the characters within. This volume showcases the wonderful relationship between Chinese folklore and culture to food!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This dark and fantastic collection of food-themed stories showcases the stunning art of an up-and-coming Chinese avant-garde illustrator. Two hungry ghosts crash a royal party while hunting insect spirits for their meal; a young chef's gruesome cooking experiments ("Aren't those eggs a la rotting fish?") turn off humans but delight passing demons; grinning old women reveal the bizarre secret ingredient in their New Year's dumplings. The stories are a blend of old and new, mixing Chinese folklore, traditional monster and spirit designs, and traditional ink-and-watercolor techniques into wholly original stories with modern visual touches drawn from manga, European comics, and fantasy genre artists like Yoshitaka Amano. Dao switches up her visual style from story to story, alternately lavishing attention on detailed, jewel-like watercolors; rendering action in rough, thick brushstrokes; or washing a street scene in nostalgic sepia tones. The plots are likewise eclectic, united by a dreamlike fairy tale mood with a touch of surrealism and a wicked, cheerfully vulgar sense of humor. The food also always looks delicious, even when it's made from disgusting origins. This visual feast is tantalizingly short but peppered with unexpected pleasures.
