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briancrandall's review
5.0
The day the strip launched, e-mails poured in. There was anger, confusion, and praise. One letter was from a man who’d read the paper on an airplane. He was moving back to Ireland after two years in San Francisco, retreating home to sort out his life. While the plane sat idle on the runway, stewardesses offered newspapers to the passengers, and opening to the cover of the Datebook section, the man saw the building he’d been renting an apartment in. “I knew then that leaving was the wrong choice,” he wrote to me. [169, from the Afterword]
aaairm's review
1.0
Excellent art, but I didn’t really understand what he’s going for with the “story”.
I’d give it a 4/5 for the art, but I don’t think he did the series for the drawings. Strange book.
I’d give it a 4/5 for the art, but I don’t think he did the series for the drawings. Strange book.
rebekah_nobody's review
2.0
The mismatch between the quality of the sketches (exemplary) and the quality of the text (pretentiously prosaic) is really something. Or something else?
kristennd's review
3.0
He's like a west coast Maira Kalman, which is a good thing. These pieces originally ran in the newspaper, one at a time, so they tend to be very self-contained and it's better to space out the reading over time to keep them from all mushing together. Although I really like how he draws buildings, San Francisco ends up not very attractive. Maybe it's just the sort of grimy color wash. Trees and clouds, on the rare occasions where they appear, don't look quite right, although they improved significantly towards the end (the strips are chronological). The text is a nice series of little moments. I'm glad he put his explanation of the process in the back of the book instead of in the front, leaving you to make your own impressions first. Particularly liked the one on Emil (?) Hopper and the xkcd-esque one about whether the devil is self-aware. I understand how making it a horizontal book with pages you turn up rather than to the left makes for neater shelving, but it was still a pain to flip through that way.
mferber's review
5.0
This is a strange, beautiful book that I hardly know how to describe. It's a collection of what for lack of a better term I have to call comic strips that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle between 2003 and 2006. Each consists of one or two illustrated panels and some text that often has no apparent connection to the artwork. The illustrations are lovely sepia-toned pen-and-ink drawings of scenes from San Francisco (or, in a couple of cases and without explanation, Paris); they might depict a familiar landmark, or an off-kilter view out the window of a café, or a building glimpsed between two others; some are hyperrealistic and others wildly distorted. There are no people — the presence of humanity in All Over Coffee is restricted to the accompanying text, which is even more enigmatic than the drawings, taking the forms of aphorisms, snippets of dialogue, or weird little modern kōans, which are usually mysterious, often desolate, sometimes funny, and very rarely not there at all.
It all adds up to something I can't say I really understand but I was completely taken by it anyway. The sheer beauty of the artwork has a lot to do with that; these strange, barren renderings capture something of what originally captured me about San Francisco. In fact I bought it almost entirely on impulse based on the cover art, a gorgeous view over Russian Hill out to Alcatraz and Angel Island. I'm not regretting it.
(Best of all, All Over Coffee is still running in the Chronicle, and fully archived on SFGate.)
It all adds up to something I can't say I really understand but I was completely taken by it anyway. The sheer beauty of the artwork has a lot to do with that; these strange, barren renderings capture something of what originally captured me about San Francisco. In fact I bought it almost entirely on impulse based on the cover art, a gorgeous view over Russian Hill out to Alcatraz and Angel Island. I'm not regretting it.
(Best of all, All Over Coffee is still running in the Chronicle, and fully archived on SFGate.)
sshabein's review
5.0
All Over Coffee is a gorgeous book, an instant favorite, and I cannot recommend it enough.
(My full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.)
(My full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.)
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