A review by mferber
All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna

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.)