I decided to make an edible comic for this year’s 24 hour comic day event put on by the Mid-Missouri Comics Collective. To make the comic I used edible food decorator pens to draw on 24 burrito sized tortillas. I took photos of the tortillas as I finished drawing them, and I used the tortillas to make quesadillas to feed the other 24 hour comic day participants.

Read the full comic:

About the Process:

In the beginning I took a few hours to work out some rough sketches for my story. It helped a lot that most of the actual drawing was pre-planned because you can’t really pencil or erase on tortillas.

I used these food decorator pens to draw on the tortillas. I found these near the cake decorating supplies in the store, but they don’t really have a taste to them and can work for decorating many different foods. They are a little tough to draw with, but feel a little like brush pens.

Here’s a baked quesadilla that just came out of the handy quesadilla maker. I used two “pages” to make one quesadilla with both outside sides having art on them.

I cut the quesadilla into slices following the folds made by the quesadilla maker. I usually used cheese in the middle of the tortillas with some variation of salsa, garlic powder, or cilantro sprinkled in. Someone suggested I make one with crushed up candy bars, so there was one sugary quesadilla made.

We had quite a crowd of participants this year, and luckily they all were eager to help out and eat my project. Check out the comics that they drew.

Here’s some food based puns that were put up on the whiteboard throughout the day. Most of these suggestions were made by Keith Chan and Unitzoid.

About the idea:

I’m not sure where I got the idea for an edible comic, but I’ve always found edible art and graphics interesting. I imagine that someone somewhere has created an edible comic before but I just haven’t heard of it. I think some more cartoonists should give it a shot!

After I had the idea to use tortillas to make the comic I did a little searching and found that tortilla art is nothing new. In fact, tortilla art is a growing trend among artists with Chicano roots, though most of the art doesn’t seem to be edible. I’m not the first cartoonist to work on tortillas either; cartoonist Julia Wertz has done some tortilla based art of her own.

Final comments:

This project worked out really smoothly overall. Many thanks to the Columbia Art League for hosting the event, Josh Nichols & Scott Ziolko for event organizing, Unitzoid for suggesting ingredients, Jason R. for the quesadilla maker, and to all the other artists for ideas, support, and appetite!

(Updated – 05/27/14)