“A lot of indie cartoonists were playing with tropes in comics but it was always horror or cyberpunk or Dungeons & Dragons; it felt like porn wasn’t something that most were checking out,” says Ryan Sands, co-founder of comic anthology Thickness, who alongside artist Michael Deforge curates this graphic panorama of sexual desire. “For this installment, Michael and I approached our stable of contributors and asked them to turn their gaze and brushes to the fraught intersection of food and sex.” The fetishistic depictions are featured in this preview of the eighth issue of food quarterly, Lucky Peach. Founded by Momofuku’s David Chang and cookbook author Peter Meehan, it is published by the San Francisco-based literary powerhouse, McSweeney’s, obsessing on a single theme for each issue, in this case, gender. “Our goal was to present a blur of quick takes on the theme across sexual proclivities with some of our favorite cartoonists,” explains Sands, who gathered artists including Jonny Negron, Angie Wang and Brandon Graham to create the daring series, supporting new talent with his publishing house, Youth in Decline. “We’re interested in the off-kilter stuff. I like to try and not think of Lucky Peach as a food publication when I can,” adds Walter Green, the magazine’s Art Director. “Ideally, it is a place where illustrators feel like they can experiment. My dream is to eventually do an issue where we do not commission any drawings of food.”

Lucky Peach, the Gender issue is published on September 10.