“Figure 4, Peyote”: Comics and Graphic Narrative in Anarchist Cookbooks, 1971-Present

ABSTRACT

Journalists, politicians, and law enforcement professionals have linked anarchist cookbooks to various crimes including bank robberies, hijackings, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings. By braiding comics scholarship with tactical technical communication (TTC), this article asks how anarchist cookbooks deploy comics techniques, formal features, and affordances to convey subversive tactics to audiences. We identify visual-verbal tactics that recur throughout anarchist cookbooks, identify comics elements associated with these tactics, and suggest implications for research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Research methods
• textual analysis
• visual rhetoric/visualization techniques
• tactical technical communication comics
• graphic narrative
• qualitative research
• anarchist cookbooks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hilary A. Sarat-St. Peter

Hilary A. Sarat-St. Peter is an associate professor of professional and technical writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her scholarly work examines how people produce, read, and circulate technical writing in non-workplace contexts.

Austin L. St. Peter

Austin L. St. Peter is a doctoral candidate in information studies at Dominican University. His scholarly work examines how people in non-workplace and hobby contexts engage in information behaviors such as seeking, encountering, and sharing.