The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 August 2007
by Shannon Wheeler
A copy of this book was picked up by a friend who attended the 2006 Comicon in San Diego. The contents, though, date from 1993 to 1999, and include the volumes 1-8 of the Too Much Coffee Man comic (including volumes 6 and 7, which never existed). So, the reader is harking back to an early period of the life and artwork of the author, who continues to produce comic art on-line and in print. There is a pair of plots in this book, with the drunken collapse of one character and the ascent of another (the author), both interspersed with the adventures and even the death of Too Much Coffee Man. Wheeler's drawings display a deft comic style, funny, occasionally disturbing, and with enough hint of the real to imagine that TMCM lives in our world, where heaven is a huge cup of coffee, and hell is Starbucks. TMCM travels through these pages at a frantic pace (maybe he should switch to decaf). The other plots have a self-referential twenty-something downbeat charm. The book has an introduction by Henry Rollins, and a few comments by Wheeler himself, comments that give TMCM some context, maybe more context than he deserves.
Also by Wheeler: [Too Much Coffee Man's Guide for the Perplexed]