Eat Your Heart Out: How Automne Zingg Turned Heartache Into a Series of Deliciously Funny Drawings
The illustrator behind the vegan cookbooks “Defensive Eating with Morrissey” and “Comfort Eating with Nick Cave” shares some tasty morsels from the project.
Automne Zingg’s stark and surreal illustrations dish out darkly funny, sometimes inscrutable critiques of pop culture: Bernie Sanders as a UFC fighter, Chris Hansen asking Freddy Krueger to take a seat, Coco Chanel sitting confidently astride an American Apparel model. Her latest project combines her signature dark humor with a dash of domesticity—a pair of illustrated cookbooks that feature melanch0lic musicians Morrissey and Nick Cave weeping and binge-eating all sorts of comfort food, coupled with real recipes for tasty plant-based dishes from vegan chef Joshua Ploeg.
We spoke to Zingg via email to learn more about the project and hear the stories behind a few of our favorite images. She also shared some tracks she recommends eating your feelings to, songs that sound especially good when paired with a massive, soul-soothing bowl of (dairy-free) ice cream.
How the cookbooks came to be
via Automne Zingg
Three years ago, my life felt like a Charlie Brown garbage fire. Everything was falling apart. I wasn’t eating much, and the only thing that provided me comfort was music. Whenever I go through a bad time, certain albums are like sonic comfort foods to me—so I took that idea further and began drawing my sonic ‘comfort foods’ eating actual comfort foods.
It started out with me drawing Siouxsie Sioux eating tacos, The Sisters Of Mercy munching on Cinnabons, and Rozz Williams with a bunch of hot dogs in his mouth. I ended up drawing every single person I was listening to. Nick Cave was a go-to—I would spend entire days playing his records on a loop. The absurdity of these goofy doodles of him crying into his mashed potatoes kind of cheered me up.
I compiled all those drawings into a zine called Comfort Eating with Nick Cave: 13 Images of Food Drama, and sold that zine for money so I could actually eat. Pretty soon I became that girl who drew pictures of rock stars eating things, and people started asking me to do more.
Morrissey was always requested, so I drew pictures of him eating and hoarding things—not just food, but basically anything that wasn’t meat. Many of the pictures had bad puns involving his lyrics mixed with familiar and comforting pop culture characters from my youth. It was way more playful and weird than what I was doing with Nick Cave. Those drawings became another zine called Defensive Eating with Morrissey: 13 Images of Food Hoarding.
Microcosm Publishing sold these zines in their shop and asked me to send more, but I was too broke to print any. A year later they approached me to turn them into cookbooks with recipes created by the vegan chef Joshua Ploeg. I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life, and I was super into the idea.
Joshua really blew my mind with some of the recipes he came up with. I sent him so many weird images that had nothing to do with food, and he turned them all into recipes. I remember sending him a drawing of Morrissey eating the comments section off the internet. He didn’t bat an eye, and came up with a recipe called “Internet.”
The Birthday Party and The Smiths were pretty influential bands for me as a teenager, and I’ve always felt like Nick Cave and Morrissey are legendary on so many levels. There is an untouchable elegance and beauty to their personas. My art has always been focused on humanizing larger-than-life figures, so drawing these two sophisticated men doing something as intimate as eating was an extension of my interest in making mundane things seem dramatic.
Some might think I’m poking fun at them, but this all came from a really loving and goofy place. I hope people get the humor.
“I picture Morrissey eating grapes and poetry,” says Zingg. “I picture Nick Cave eating cigarettes and shadows.”
What was she thinking? The story behind four illustrations from the cookbooks:
“Morrissey hates the queen. You hear a lot about that in his lyrics. An image of him chewing on one of her hats was my way of showing him devouring her symbol of authority and power. That is the deep answer.
The less deep answer is that it was really fun to draw Morrissey eating the queen’s hat.”
“Does anything take longer than baking a potato? There is a Smiths song called ‘These Things Take Time.’ I played on that joke and threw Mr. Potato Head into the oven.”
“This one is kind of personal. I was trying to get over my ex when I drew this. The two of us used to eat a lot of mac and cheese at 3 am, and I kind of associate that food with our relationship. Nick Cave intensely repeats the lyrics ‘I start to cry, I start to cry’ during the song ‘From Her To Eternity.’ I was crying when I drew this but started laughing when I finished.”
“Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue did an incredibly dark duet called ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow,’ which is basically about a killer and his victim. It was a bold career move for Kylie, who’s known more for pop hits, and a fascinating collaboration between the two. I played on the absurdity of that by drawing Nick Cave eating a ‘pop tarte’ while thinking of Kylie.”
The Defensive Eating with Morrissey and Comfort Eating with Nick Cave project is live on Kickstarter until July 14.
