Q&A: David Wondrich, Author of The Comic Book History of the Cocktail

If’ve you’ve ever craved a history book that makes all those dates, places, and names a little easier to digest and more fun to read about, David Wondrich’s The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On is the tome for you. The James Beard Award–winning author of Imbibe! is already every cocktailian’s favorite history professor, with his compelling storytelling skills. But pair that with Dean Kotz’s illustrations and you’ve got a history book you’ll want to read over and over, perhaps with a drink in hand.

Wondrich works his magic with historical cocktail moments, from 17th-century sailors inventing punch to “King Cocktail” Dale DeGroff taking the helm of The Rainbow Room in the ’80s. Sprinkled throughout are cocktail recipes and short explainers, called “Chasers,” about topics such as the distillation process and Hollywood’s discovery of the cocktail.

We talked with Wondrich about what it was like writing cocktail history in comic book form, who he’d cast as the superhero in this story, and what he wishes was his own superpower.

Imbibe: You’ve written many books about cocktail history; what was both fun and challenging about this particular format?

David Wondrich: I would never write any sort of book at all if I understood the challenges before I started it, and this one was no different. I thought it would be easy, like I always do. It wasn’t—but where the usual challenges I’ve faced in my books are in things such as research; in finding enough to say, here it was a question of how to say it, and how to get pictures to do the work. But the thrill of seeing how Dean [Kotz] made the words come to life is tough to beat.

How did you decide which stories to include?

”Decide”—heh. It feels like I basically put in every story I know. Well, okay, I did have to leave out a lot of very recent ones, both because I was running out of space and because I wanted to avoid the recency bias that gives us things like a 500-best-movies-of-all-time list where 300 of them were released after 2000. 

Which story in the book lent itself particularly well to the comic book layout?

Well, there are several—at least I hope there are! A couple of favorites: the story of what Prohibition did to American drinking makes for a fun few pages—if something that depressing can be fun. But there are cops busting down doors and bootleggers and speakeasies and all that good stuff. There’s also the so-called “Contest at Cocktails,” where a British peer met a Buffalo businessman at the bar of the New York Hotel in 1867 to see who could drink more whiskey cocktails. Damned irresponsible, but amusing. Oh, and the story of Jerry Thomas and his remarkable life. I wish we had more Americans like him.

Did you have much input on what would be depicted in the illustrations? Was it a collaboration with Dean Kotz?

The way it worked is, I basically wrote a shooting script for each page, complete with stage directions—how many drawings, what should be in each, plus captions and dialogue—and Dean interpreted it. He was free—even encouraged—to change whatever needed changing, to figure out his own angles and framing and all that. Almost invariably, his initial choices were what ended up in the book.

Was there a story you wish you could fit into the book? 

I would have loved to tell the story of BAR—Beverage Alcohol Resource, where F. Paul Pacult, Dale DeGroff, Doug Frost, Steve Olson, and I figured we’d start a sort of cocktail/spirits university. Twenty years and literally thousands of students (including an impressive number of the world’s top bartenders) later, it’s still going strong, although most of the original partners have retired from it.

In cocktail history, who would be the superhero? The villain?

The superhero would have to be Jerry Thomas, just because he’s already one—he knew all the cocktails and all the jokes, all the patter; combining the two essential skills of the bartender. Weirdly, I don’t think there are any real villains. Sure, there are petty thieves, stealing credit for other people’s drinks, and sellouts and killjoys. But compared to the real world, the cocktail world is honorable and nice. That doesn’t make for a great story, but it’s not bad to live with.

If you could have a superpower, what would it be? What would your superhero name be?

It would be to know precisely and beyond a shadow of a doubt who invented every drink, along with when and where and what that person’s story is. Given how much everyone likes speculating about that stuff, I think my name would have to be The Spoilsport.

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