One of the mixed blessings of this review thing is that I get a lot of material to review. It's great that I have such a diversity of material to look at, but the amount of material means that the good stuff sometimes winds up buried for a little while before I discover it. Such was the case with Too Much Coffee Man Magazine, which was sent to me by former Fourth Rail collaborator and new TMCM editor Patrick Keller. I have some familiarity with Too Much Coffee Man and its creator Shannon Wheeler, in part because he's a former Austinite whose cartoons graced several of the local papers, in part because of a general knowledge of the comics scene and in part because my wife subscribed to TMCM for quite a while. However, Too Much Coffee Man Magazine is not really focused on coffee or Shannon Wheeler, instead it is a collection of indy cartoons and funny and informative articles, this issue loosely themed around travel. It's an eclectic mix of stuff, but everything in it is a lot of fun, and it's certainly plenty of entertainment for its five dollar cost.
TMCM #20 reads like a mixture of an SPX anthology, an issue of The Comics Journal and one of those free weekly papers you find in all the cool cities. Features on music and comics co-exist with feature style journalism on travel and even a few tidbits of fiction, all mixed in with comic strips, both in the margins and taking up full pages of their own. It's a beautifully designed package, friendly and unassuming without looking unprofessional or amateurish. In reading it, you get the feeling that you're reading a local publication without a specific locale, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn't, that's the feeling I got, and I liked it.
The array of cartoonist talent at work in this issue is impressive. Of course, Shannon Wheeler has a pretty extensive sequence of pages pitting his surreal hero, Too Much Coffee Man, against various anxieties, including weight gain, and he manages to poke fun at the sheeplike mentality of the Atkins diet and the absurdity of Internet spam as well. The topics aren't new, but Wheeler's absurdist take on them is, and it's pretty fun. There are also short features from a number of names known to the indy community, including Rob Osborne's (1,000 Steps to World Domination), Ted Rall, Douglas Paszkiewicz and Keith Knight, in addition to several names that were new, at least to me. Todd Ramsell turns in a wordless and funny examination of ninjas and robots, and FC Brandt does a dead-on impersonation of Bill Watterson that recasts Chomsky and Mailer as Calvin and Hobbes (the cartoon characters, not the philosophers). It's more "oh, that's funny, polite chuckle" funny than laugh-out-loud funny, but it is pretty clever and very artfully done.
The articles are as varied in subject and approach as the cartoons. There's a similar vibe to many of them, which is mostly informative with a side of snark, but the personalities of the writers come through in each piece, and there's a nice variety of material covered. Patrick Keller's (presumably autobiographical) piece on traveling panic attacks and Andrew McAninch's "Let's Go... Die" both explore the darker side of travel, with a darkly comic streak that is, again, of the polite laugh funny than outrageous laugh funny, but both writers make some interesting observations and shed some light on aspects of travel you won't find in your average Lonely Planet guide (even though McAninch's piece talks about those very guides). Thomas Skidmore and Jed Alexander take on travel of a more fictional sort, with Alexander's tale of meeting a God come to live in Oakland Hills a laid-back and highly enjoyable piece of fiction with a touch of religious parody and Skidmore's story of a car that runs on vegetable oil the sort of absurd, vaguely environmental wackiness that Wheeler himself does so well in his cartoons.
Some of the articles strike pretty far afield of the travel theme, and that's perfectly OK. Drew Winchester analyzes comics movies and ranks them as "cream of the crop" or "bottom of the barrel," and I found myself agreeing with his general conclusions even though I disagreed with some of the specifics. Certainly his piece has some very clever wit to it, especially in regards to his hilariously off-color intro which compares a comic book movie marathon to a weekend smuggling dope out of Mexico. Joe Biel investigates zines, music and, in one particularly strange and fun review, AOL 9.0, in a style that is reminiscent of the Unified Review Theory guys. David Hayward goes even more far afield by reviewing various ring tones for cellphones. And Mark Russell provides "The Lois Lane Dialogues," a look at the life of Lois and Superman if it were a one-act play or a self-help book, which is both very funny and kind of insightful at the same time.
There are other features, including an amusing back-and-forth letter column with TMCM readers and editor Patrick Keller, but it would be impossible to really cover them all without writing out to basically the length of the magazine. Basically, TMCM is not going to be for everyone, but if you have any interest at all in the small press or the more independent, corporate-free culture which is slowly disappearing from America, you should snap up an issue and give it a look. If you're a hippy, intellectual, art snob or just plain interested in something a little bit to the left of normal, you'll definitely find a lot to like in these pages. 8/10
