Recipe for Disaster and Other Stories

Penny Moran Van Horn’s single-issue Recipe for Disaster and Other Stories, published by Fantagraphics in 1998, collects a trio of short comics that blend deadpan humor with domestic unease. Van Horn’s clean, expressive linework grounds surreal situations—like a disastrous cooking experiment—in a quietly relatable world. This debut marks an early, self-contained showcase of her distinctive voice, offering a compact glimpse into the off-kilter storytelling that would define her later work.