The best books about alcohol and childhood that walk a fine line between horror and humor

In this irreverent abecedarian, Gorey’s signature black and white etchings depict how unsuspecting children meet an absurd and macabre end. Each letter of the alphabet details a terrible fate. Each time I read it, I laugh out loud. 

My personal favorite remains “Z is for Zillah who drank too much Gin.” An innocent Zillah sits looking out at the viewer, glass in hand and an almost empty bottle of gin on the table while across from her sits a skeleton-headed baby doll in a white gown. This is an example of how Gorey satirizes nineteenth-century cautionary temperance texts in which small children die after taking just one sip of alcohol. 

I appreciate both how Gorey employs visual humor to skewer sentimentality and how he uses the picture book format as well as childish objects in his art to rupture fictions of childhood innocence. Gorey knew that sometimes terrible things just happen, and that often adults’ cautionary tales are a cover for more intimate and everyday kinds of harm.

The appalling schoolgirls that attend Ronald Searle’s fictional girls’ boarding school drink copious amounts of alcohol, smoke, and regularly set the school on fire. In Searle’s cartoons horror and humor are tightly wound. But don’t let the girls’ boarding school gym slips, high black socks, boater hats, and hair bows fool you. These young ladies grin at violence and delight in rule breaking.

Searle drew the second and third St. Trinian’s cartoon while he was a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II. Remarkably, Searle kept a visual record of his time in captivity, including self-portraits, four hundred secret sketches of prisoners and the brutalities of the guards as well as seventy-two cartoons, including the second and third St. Trinian’s drawings which were published in 1945 after his return from the war.

I love all of Lynda Barry’s comics, but It’s So Magic! is my favorite collection.

Barry’s adolescent heroines steal wine from parents and from synagogues; they drink the cheap stuff like Boones Farm Apple Wine, and concoctions of mixed hard liquor made from whatever they can find in their houses that give the reader a hangover just thinking about it.

Barry’s graphic narratives also include stories of sexual abuse that are visually overlaid with gross-out drinking humor that will make some laugh and others turn away. Through visual humor, she brings into view both drinking girls and knowledge about sexual assault often hidden from view.

Barry’s alternative lessons remain radical in this politically fraught time when neo-temperance advocates attempt to tie #MeToo to abstinence, once again trying to enforce the idea that girls and women are to blame if they drink too much alcohol.

This book comes in the form of a small baby board book. On the back of this parody of a board book, the author asks “Are you a parent? Are you thirsty? Too many of us allow our infant sons and daughters to lay about idly napping, drinking milk, and sometimes ‘turning over.’ Why not have them mix you a cocktail? Thanks, Baby!”

Each page includes a mixology template for different members of the family. I particularly like the first recipe- a martini for mama. Additionally, like educational shape recognition texts that purportedly teach babies to organize visual information, Brown inserts easily recognizable liquor brands, Bombay Sapphire distilled London dry gin and Martini dry vermouth.

That the martini is the mother’s drink tickles the viewer to question whether gin is mother’s helper or mother’s ruin. Brown’s tongue-in-cheek board book foregrounds alcohol as pleasure and a baby that brings ease rather than misery.

This picture book is one of the only contemporary books for children that shows drinking for pleasure.

After a mouse gets eaten up by a wolf, he meets a duck that lives in “the belly of the beast.” The two become fast friends and live happily in the wolf’s stomach. Together they make soup, dance to records, and enjoy the finer things in life.  When the wolf complains of a stomachache, the duck calls up a cure for him—advising that he eat a hunk of good chess, a flagon of wine, and some beeswax candles.

After the wolf does so, mouse and duck don top hats, tuxedo jackets, bow ties and sit down to feast, raising their glasses of wine to the health of the wolf. Ultimately, duck and mouse save the wolf’s life and in return he grants them their wish to return to their home in his stomach.

One of the final double page spreads shows duck dancing with abandon as Mouse, wearing a cape and a pan on his head, wields a hockey stick and a vinyl record. Moderate drinking and intoxication lead to pleasure rather than pain in this book.