Never Too Much Coffee Man

Too Much Coffee man's Amusing Musings

Dark Horse Comics, 144 pp., $12.95

Too Much Coffee man: A Humorous Magazine No. 14

I resumed drinking coffee roughly two years ago after an extended time away from my dark muse necessitated by -- as my physician called it -- an "acute anxiety disorder." This is not uncommon, I've found. Before "the wasteland years," as they've come to be known (or, more embarrassingly, "the decaf debacle"), I'd been a steady pot-a-day imbiber since somewhere in the vicinity of my 10th year. I got hooked young, and it messed me up. Shit happens, but coffee is a stealthy addiction that creeps up on little feral ferret's paws, unlike, say, booze, or dope, or Japanese anime, all of which tend to wallop you over the head with the metaphorical two-by-four of chemovisual dependency right at the outset.

While wandering through the no-caf-non-life of the coffeeless, I discovered Shannon Wheeler and his twitchy, existential everyman alter-ego Too Much Coffee Man. I was slowly but steadily hooked, a tiny fly writhing in a web of Wheeler's quarterly comic expulsions and caffeinated rantings (www.tmcm.com). A guy's gotta have a hobby, sure, but pestering the gang at Austin Books for the new TMCM every month gets old faster than John Hurt. Eventually I laid off the hardback stuff (but, oh, that Nike commercial) and resumed the real-deal, coal-black syrupy stuff in chipped china cups with enough sugar dumped in that, if you stuck the spoon in, it'd stand straight up, and then, if terrorists crashed a plane into the spoon, it still wouldn't fall. I'm on my fifth of the day just about now and I'm feeling no pain. Just a slight numbness in the tips of my fingers and a low, droney buzzing in my skull.

Amusing Musings, to start with, has the best cover illo of any of Wheeler's collections so far: TMCM reflected -- just barely -- in a steaming crimson mug of the good stuff. The analogy to Alice's looking glass is there, somewhere, but why get deep? It's a pretty mini-mug. There's much to laff at behind that cover, as there always is (Wheeler's sense of the absurd is sui generis and manages to be simultaneously snarky and sublime, a comedic tightrope act that always makes me think of the Marx Brothers on a NyQuil bender), but choice brews include a truly fascinating exploration of "The Coffee Lawsuit," brought against burger behemoth McDonald's by a scalded septuagenarian in Albuquerque. Wheeler's pictorial retelling of the accident and ensuing lawsuit -- in which McDonald's was revealed to be, unsurprisingly, a bunch of heartless corporate weasels -- ends with lukewarm coffee all around. But who goes to Mickey D's for the java, anyway? The very best thing about Wheeler's TMCM has always been the character's purely caffeinated vision; he's like some dime-store Heidegger, pontificating, musing (as in the title), and flying off on mad flights of fancy, sketched in Wheeler's sure, simple, black-lined style. He goes where we go, when we go on a shrieking ebon coffee jag.

The TMCM mag is much the same, albeit with more essays and less comics. Bob Bernstein's "A Beer Lover's Guide to Coffee" is indispensable (my favorite brew, Harp Lager, finds its caffeinated counterpart in Papua New Guinean coffee), and Jed Alexander's post-9/11 diatribe "Why Patriotism Makes You Stupid" is dead-on smartstuff. There's even a Sam Hurt strip (not a new one, though). Taken together, book and magazine, it's almost too much, like huffing fresh-ground Indonesian. It makes your head hurt, but in a good way, like when a safe with a million dollars in it bops you on the noggin'. Almost exactly like that.