The thrill is not gone: Cheap Thrills Cuisine

Cheap Thrills Cuisine is touted as “the world’s first culinary comic strip”. Not every newspaper carries the strip created by Bill Lombardo and Tak Bui. The low-profile strip has been chugging along for many years without any fanfare. Cheap Thrills Cuisine was published in book form way back in 1995 collecting several strips of the time. The niche comic strip is still going strong without abating. The strip is distributed by Andrews McMeel Universal and hosted on GoComics every Wednesday. Chef Peppi delights the audience as the proportionally challenged curator backdrop chef who recreates Bill Lombardo’s recipes as illustrated by Tak Bui.

Can you believe it, Cheap Thrills Cuisine has been around since the ’70s. It was published back then in alternative newspapers till it made mainstream in the early ’90s. Like a slow-cooking stew, the strip just keeps going on without any fanfare. You will not find much on Google about this elusive comic strip.

“Time was, in the old “CTC” strips in the alternative press, Peppi was a looser, loonier fellow. He could just say “a dash of this” and “a splash of that,” and his concoctions might spill visually from one panel to another. He would propose, for a Jell-O mold, a Volkswagen hubcap circa 1960.”

The Toronto-based Canadian illustrator is also the creator of the daily strip of PC and PIXEL.

Fun Fact: The oldest running comic strip is The Katzenjammer Kids which debuted in 1897.