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.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.