Thursday, January 1, 2009

Paul Madonna, All Over Coffee

Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee is a marvelous book. It is a collection of strips from a daily and Sunday comic series that Madonna did for the San Francisco Chronicle. The text is minimal, poetic often (without being pretentiously so, though there's a slip here and there), and the drawings are just beautiful.

As I was thumbing the book in the bookstore I was immediately reminded of the work of Ben Katchor, who Madonna notes briefly as an influence in his Afterword (more on that later). And I love Katchor.

But whereas Katchor is, perhaps, playfully surreal, Madonna is astonishingly focused and detailed and yet at the same time stripped down. There are no people in his work which makes it at one and the same time both entirely your own and oddly unreal. The text accompanying each picture is evocative and more like a snippet of conversation overheard among... well, almost ghosts. I think this is part of what gives the pieces their haunting, ethereal beauty.

Madonna also includes a rather extensive Afterword, where he goes into great depth of the hows, whys, and wherefores of the strip. Interesting, all of it. And he is a good writer on the whole. Yet there seems something... obsessive isn't the word. Unnecessary? Clearly (though rather perplexingly to me) the strip was controversial -- perhaps for its minimalism? -- and the Afterword reads not so much as an apologia (which would be insufferable) but rather as an effort to explain. In great detail. So that you have the opportunity to understand. Everything.

Wholly unnecessary. Though clearly Madonna felt compelled. Well good on him. No worries. But you? You go ahead and enjoy the strips -- they're marvellous.

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