Lethal Chefs in comic strips.
- Effie Munyon from Piranha Club, to the point where it's her most recognizable character trait. Her signature dish is various variations of squid, which she usually just boils whole, but she's been known to make everything from pigs' feet to gorilla pie. Ironically, it's been implied that she can cook perfectly fine, but cooks horrible food out of some misguided desire to be unique. At one point she tried to cook a deliberately disgusting meal to punish Sid Fernwilter for eating dinner with another woman; the end result was something Sid considered to be the most delicious thing she had cooked in years. When it was pointed out that Effie had never been shown eating her own cooking, she stated that "I might be a little crazy, but I'm not stupid."
- Bill Mauldin threw many jabs at Army cuisine in Willie and Joe.
- Some examples from Foxtrot:
- Paige has been shown to be able to cause boiling pasta to burst into flames. Pasta that is submerged in water.(while discussing Survivor's food challenges)
Peter: That reminds me. I think Mom is letting Paige cook dinner tonight.
Jason: A perfect example. Have them eat something like that!
Peter: But don't you need to have a survivor? - Paige tried to make Thanksgiving dinner all by herself. In the end, she was the only one willing to try some of it.Andy: Did you have to eat it?
Paige: Mother please, it hurts to talk. - Roger is also shown to be this, when he's grilling hamburgers or on the rare occasions when Andy's out, and he's left to cook for the kids.
- Andy is somwhere between this and Cordon Bleugh Chef— while she's capable of making perfectly edible food, because she's a health nut Andy usually makes meals out of tofu, lima beans, and other "healthy" food that frequently makes her family sick, and they hate the taste of even if it doesn't. Her family constantly complains about her cooking and attempts to sabotage it, but she's either oblivious or doesn't care. One of the reasons Andy hates her own mother is because she's the direct opposite.
- It's less prominent with Peter and Jason, but they can still be pretty bad; Peter usually has more success cooking for himself than he does multiple people, and Jason once decided to use his chemistry set to substitute an ingredient while making cookies.
- Paige has been shown to be able to cause boiling pasta to burst into flames. Pasta that is submerged in water.
- A few examples from Garfield:
- Irma's diner has notoriously bad food. The soup has hair in it with rollers, the coffee tastes like turpentine, there is a hoof in the meat loaf, the cows for the hamburgers are burned alive, and so on.
- Jon Arbuckle also qualifies. Garfield remarked that he's the only cook who could ruin cereal, right before Jon sets the bacon aflame. Garfield has also used one of Jon's pancakes as a gong, and Jon's casserole to chase mice out of the house.Garfield: The only way Jon knows my dinner's finished is when it sets off the smoke alarm.
- "Cookie", the military cook from Beetle Bailey has a knack for bad cooking (a common stereotype of military cooks). Jokes about his meatballs are the most common. Thankfully, one of the soldiers he caters to is Sargeant Snorkel, who will eat anything (he's actually gone to civilian restaurants and wished he were eating Cookie's fare instead).
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- Calvin is a bona fide Lethal Chef. In one strip, Calvin's Mom is sick so Calvin makes her breakfast in bed: orange juice, eggs and toast. Calvin delivers his mom the eggs smoldering and with a chisel to chip it out of the pan. When his mom asks about the orange juice and toast, Calvin replies "Dad said not to tell you about that until you're better". He'll presumably get better, considering how little experience he has.
- Calvin's mom herself could certainly qualify as well. Though Calvin is prone to gross exaggeration on how bad her food is (just as he is with everything else), there isn't much that goes on the family's dinner table that is visually identifiable as food. Most dinner plates are filled with what can only be described as "glop", which sometimes takes on colors that no food should ever be. Even Calvin's dad sometimes comments on this:Dad: I thought we were having stuffed peppers. Honey, what the heck IS this? Whatever it is, I'm not eating it!Context
- His dad probably qualifies too. Once when his mom was sick and he claimed he could cook for them, having done so for himself in college, Calvin remembered his mom saying he had lived solely on canned soup and frozen waffles the entire four years.Dad: "Well, your mom wasn't there, so she wouldn't know. Get the syrup out, would you?"
- Hägar the Horrible:
- Hagar's daughter, Honi, is such a horrible cook she even manages to mess up cooking water.
- The same goes for Lucky Eddie, who prepares the meals when Hagar's warband are on raids.
- Egon, the Foreign Legion chef in Beau Peep, veers between this and Cordon Bleugh Chef, but is mostly this. Peep once ate the contents of an ashtray and thought it was only marginally worse than normal.
- Several Brother Juniper strips make cracks at Juniper's lack of cooking skills. One such strip has unidentifiable blackish lumps on everyone's plates.Dismayed monk: His cooking almost makes grace at meals uncalled for!
- The Military Cook from Sturmtruppen is the Trope Codifier as far as Italian comics are concerned-and will admit that anyone who willingly eats his cooking is insane. In one series of strips he had living ferocious spaghetti that he would sick on anyone who insulted his cooking-and it was nowhere near the worst thing he cooked-that is either the man-eating soup (he had tried to use lightning to cook, and the lunch came to life), a concoction that turns soldiers into hairy monsters and gives addiction (the soldiers had complained the lunch was always the same, and demanded he tried to be creative. He decided to please them), or the cholera-infected lunch.
- In one Stone Soup strip, Andy asks his uncle why he cooks instead of his wife, Joan. After chastising him for making assumptions about gender roles, he quietly adds "and besides, have you tasted her cooking?" Joan yells that she heard that.
- Yosefa from the Israeli comic Zbeng!! specializes in inedible, rock hard doughnuts. She once used a batch of radioactive yeast to make them extra fluffy, which created a gigantic mutant doughnut that threatened to crush the school. And even worse, she has a truly loving boyfriend, who eats everything she cooks. He is a model patient in the hospital's stomach pumping section...
- In one
Big Nate strip, Marty wonders why nobody took any of his homemade Halloween candy. Nate decides to test it out on Spitsy, who hates it.Nate: And this is an animal who routinely consumes his own-
Marty: All right, all right! - Granny from Popeye is such a bad cook, that Popeye, Poopdeck Pappy and Swee'pea only permit her to make one meal per year (during which time, the three of them will sneak off to eat over at Roughhouse). She has somehow managed to burn water, and her biscuits have paved many a driveway.
- One strip in The Born Loser had Brutus eating in a Greasy Spoon and complaining that his clams tasted funny. The cook turned to him and said "Can't be the clams. I've been serving the same batch for two weeks and nobody's complained yet."
